Country Girl

Rivulets of perspiration bring shivers amid the summer swelter as they inch slowly down my spine until they are halted at the belt line, just as they did on those hot August nights that we cruised the wilderness of river bottomlands on roads rendered nearly impassible by the constant flooding of River Charlie, so named by us because we were reminded of a classmate, normally meek and mild but when aroused, you'd better look out. It was to these remote dark places that our friends eagerly retired to practice their night moves in a whirl of recalcitrant bra straps and men's trouser zippers, then to return home to inquisitive mothers, where they fabricated excuses for their moist underwear (the heat and humidity were their allies), and the boys, the hunters, congregated at the Shell station to tell tales, their veracity going unquestioned, of their nocturnal conquests. But that was not you and I, who sometimes drove without lights and in the piercing dark pretended we were astronauts floating in deep space, or in winter we were sometimes with Shackleton and his ill-fated party aboard the Endurance. Or we sat by dashboard and flashlight and read poems to each other, you preferring the masters, me liking the more modern, my growing obsession with the Beat Generation finally bringing that to an end. And so it was that after high school we went our separate ways, you staying the course, remaining one of about a thousand souls in our little hamlet, marrying an average guy who probably never dreamed of role-playing a dying Shackleton while parked in a '57 Chevy in the cold of a wilderness winter Indiana night, but was a good and faithful provider. And I in the meantime went off to the city and university, where I mingled with smart, beautiful people and married a PhD. But, you know, six decades later I still miss our drives in the swampy or frozen dark, the we that we were. So here I am, back driving those roads one last time, still arguing Ginsberg versus Whitman, turning toward town for the funeral of the girl I knew, oh so many years ago, one in a thousand in this town, but one in a million to me.

Bluejay

Veteran of old My Poetry Forum before its hiatus. Happy to be back.

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