Roadside Attractions

Perhaps it is art.
Perhaps it is chaos.
Some days it is difficult
to tell one from another,
and so you stand against one wall
and watch, see what moves
and what stays still. Look for patterns.
for the words that come from strangers
and lovers and those myriad in between,
visitors to your life, never sure
who will stay and who will leave.
Most of them leave but
you have become accustomed
to disappearances, able to hurt
and move on with a minimum of scars,
fortunate that part of you,
the part your mother told you about
when you were a bothersome young man,
that is somehow able to always look foward,
missing a thing here and there in the here and now,
but missing too the worst of the scars.

You visit them of course. Now and again
like roadside attractions,
bright signs along the way,
reminding you that somehow even gone
you are not.

About this poem

Last week I made a quick trip to Carlise, PA to do a talk to a group of Army Chaplains. It was a straight up and straight back trip, which for me is a bit odd.

I have friends and former co-workers and readers all over the country now. A side effect of a busy life and old age – an accumilation of those who have wandered in and out of my life. I generally make a point, when I am on a trip, to stop and spend a few hours talking to them. Cousins. Friends. Customers. Fellow writers and pastors and a few whom I pastor from afar. But not this trip. Straight down. Straight back.

And as a result, as I passed town after town, people came to mind, people who matter, or have mattered. People who have come and gone and still matter to me, and perhaps to whom I still matter. At least enough to share a meal or coffee or a chunk of time talking.

Oddly, when I make those kinds of stops, we rarely seem to dwell on our shared past. It’s almost always about the now and what’s ahead, life and joys and struggles. As if we had never parted.

My mother used to tell me, because I was always looking ahead, that I was missing the now. That was probably true for a bit part of my life. Less so now. I learn my lessons, even if I am a bit slow sometimes.

Recently, my wife found a site full of roadside attractions, little oddities along the roads of America that you can stop and take in for a few minutes and then move on.

From all those things, this poem.

The picture was taken at Mass MoCA, down in North Adams. It left me feeling a little disjointed and that feeling seemed to fit the poem.

Tom