Road trip to the Pow Wow 2008 - Ruth Patrick

Road trip to the Pow Wow 2008

Sleepin’ late
loungin’ on Labor Day, then
head east through early-fall
mid-morning construction
paper hills pasted
to the sky.
Feel the dust-hazed breeze sucking
their depth dry and
flat like a child’s collage.
Yellow brick road rolled out like
masking tape through green slopes scattered
with rich golden hay-rolls
to tempt Rumplestiltskin to
work overtime on the holiday.

Paint my van full of family in the foreground.
Racing trains, cows
like sheet metal cowboy cutouts
waving on hilltops.
Wild sunflowers sprinkle the roadside.
Sparkle-bright farm ponds,
Silos and windmills,
Graveyards and cornfields;
kids see
nothing but Game Boy screens.

Topeka, no Emerald City this
one big bad neighborhood
hidden in tress
sprawling ‘round
one green dome-riding
Indian;
shoot for the stars
follow his feathered shaft
in spirit
not direction
ride in
his shadow remembering
years we rode this trail;
other lifetimes
other selves who once live here.

Take California
--Avenue, not
the state of my birth or youth--
past golden arches, Burger King,
Taco Tico turned to a hair salon
painted pink,
to Twenty-Ninth Street
--Game Boys beeping in the back seat--

Dillons’ ATM turns
card to cash, Rumplestiltskin
would be green with envy.
Big wad of green in your back pocket feeling
like a high roller.
Roll on back to the road
as birds flock around a
camo-tan water tower
towering in the postcard sky
with cliché cotton clouds.

Just as
Cliché Game-Boy-playing echoes
of our own youth argue
and wonder in the back seat
“are we there yet?”
Watertower Mothership
rises through the mist
like a six-legged octopus on tiptoes
white as Mother Mary
standing to bless the entrance
of festival grounds.