Zip up bag, check drawers one last time, bathroom, unmade bed, then glance in the mirror. After a week of hotel living, you can't help feeling like a call girl or a serial killer; it's not an entirely unpleasant way to live.
On the road before 11, after the hotel laundry. Speed Limit 65. Iowa Military Museum. Veterans Hospital. Exit 135. Polk City. Easter Seals Camp. Ankeny. Gas. Diesel. Food. Lodging. Des Moines. Minneapolis.
Davenport.
80 East.
Altoona. Bondurant. Minimum speed 40. Do not pick up hitchhikers. Corn fields, then fields with other stuff growing on them, then corn fields again. Trainland USA. Touch of Holland. Exit 155.
Petty reactions to petty events is how Marjorie Perloff describes most mainstream contemporary poetry. It's hard to say everything you need to say to the person you love most in your life in the front seat of a car in ten minutes especially when you know in your guts that you will never see that person again. Jasper County Museum. Exit 164. Newton. Monroe.
Iowa Speedway Exit 168. Kellogg 7 miles. Exit 179. Oakland Acres. Rest Area —>
Grinnell. New Sharon. Exit 191. Tama. Montezuma. Diamond Lake Park. Brooklyn 8 miles. Riverside Casino.
Framed in the car window everything looks like Wyeth's Christina's world without Christina.
Assuming one is a misfit all one's life because one hasn't been lucky enough to have found the people among whom one would have fit. A bruised sky above empty fields and abandoned-looking houses. No birds. The moment the driver slams on the brakes cursing and you look up searching the visible field in what may be the last seconds of your life for the oncoming car, the fallen tree, the meteor, the person you're about to run over, the god-knows-what that will kill you but it turns out to be nothing, just a missed exit. A white clapboard church with steeple and a small graveyard beside it plus a cornfield beside that, tidy and tight as an equation.
Marango.
Iowa City.
Fireside Winery.
Cedar Rapids. Amana Colonies. What you could have said if you hadn't said what you said and then you would have left what you said unsaid and regretted that. 12.37pm. Rest Area 1 mile. Next Rest Area 34 miles.
A white cross planted by the side of the highway where someone was killed.
Cedar Rapids.
Waterloo.
The sun not quite breaking through the clouds. The autumn equinox. Scheels All Sports. Target. Visitor Information. Firefighters Memorial. Lake MacBride. Solon.
Exit 246.
Feeling reflective but not reflecting anything.
Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum. Sharpless Auctions. Always being the one to give in based on the rationale that life is too short to hold onto anger and resentment and self-righteousness to the point of always becoming the doormat others wipe their feet on so that it's better to give up being with people altogether to protect yourself from further abuse. The irony being that one never needed other people all that much to begin with.
Speed Limit 70.
Minimum 40.
Exit 267. Tipton. Moscow.
Taking a few moments to be consciously grateful that one isn't suffering a blinding pain deep inside one's skull. 1:20pm. Rock Island. Molina.
Being among the first conspiracy theorists in recorded history: the Christian Gnostics.
Parkview Family restaurant: no view of any park. Egg and cheese on croissant.
Sky the color of a napkin you use to absorb the water out of a watercolor brush after cleaning it in preparation for using a new color. 2:44pm. All the colors for which there are no adequate names. All the things for which there are no names at all.
Exit 298.
Bettendorf.
Davenport.
Words leaning on other words like sticks to prop up a makeshift sentence with which we build a rickety shelter of meaning that falls apart every time.
Exit 301.
Middle Road.
Road work ahead.
End roadwork.
Chicago 177 miles.
LeClaire.
Buffalo Bill Museum—it seems every state has one.
Illinois Welcome Center Next Right.
Obey Lane Signal.
Exit 4A. East Molina. Sterling Rock Falls. The rain stops. The sun comes out. The rain is back.
Corn, still.
Colona 4 miles. Rock River.
Everyone dies, no exception: imagine a movie in which that is the case, or a book. Illabi Zoo Exit 9. Peoria. Life is a book that keeps tacking on pages, deferring the end indefinitely. Joliet 128 miles. But you're not in any of the later pages.
T.S. Eliot saying Poetry isn't expression of emotion but an escape from emotion.
Galva. Atkinson.
1 mile.
A parent's unconscious rage when they don't see themselves in their children—and when they do. The knife your father holds to your throat when you're ten because you said you wouldn't write your grandma a thank-you note for the birthday card she sent you. T.S. Eliot saying, Only those who have real emotions would understand the need to escape them.
Corn—and one feels compelled to point out: still no farmers.
Kewanee.
Prophetstown.
Exit 33.
Did your other grandmother really believe that if someone crossed their eyes or made a hideous monster face they were in any actual danger of staying that way? Patriot Renewable Fuels. She never made you believe it but she could almost make you believe that she believed it.
Arrow Truck Lines. 3:27pm. Everyone dies: you cannot say this too much.
Right lane closed.
The right lane is often closed.
Merge.
How?
Exit 45.
Peoria.
Sterling.
Men in orange vests and white hard hats working on a bridge in a light rain. The birthplace of Ronald Reagan. Feeling fondly toward the state of Illinois because two people I've never met but with whom I've exchanged mail live here and eagerly looking out the rain-splattered window hoping to catch sight of the name of the cities in which they live on a green highway sign and the utter stupidity of feeling and doing that. All the emotions for which there are no proper names.
Samuel Beckett saying, Tears are liquefied brain.
Hennepin 2 miles.
Exit 61.
Exit 70.
Corn, sigh.
Peru.
Mendota.
Rockford.
Ottawa.
DeKalb.
Exit 90.
Fox River. Chicago Zip Lines. Middle East Conflict Memorial, as if to say we don't know who we fought or why or who the enemy will be tomorrow which is a good way to sum up a situation that seems like a badly plotted novel where none of the story lines are resolved and instead new and more dramatic complications are simply added to avoid doing so.
Morris.
Yorkville.
Exit 112.
You can't say it enough, everyone dies.
Des Plaines River.
Billboard: Jesus crucified, head bowed, crowned with thorns, Jesus is your only way to God.
Billboard: Skybox. We bare all.
Rail Safety Week:
See Tracks.
Think Trains.
Indiana straight ahead.
Cash$ —>
Dixie Highway This Exit.
Exit Open.
5:32pm.
Welcome to Indiana.
Crossroads of America.
Everyone dies.
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