A Poem

It's been a while, I know. It's been difficult lately to carve out the time or to muster the energy to write - February is dark and wicked, and it lays traps to keep us from doing what we'd like to do - but I do have things to say. Of course I do. And I hope to say some of them soon, maybe this weekend, maybe next week. In the meantime, I give you this, which my mother just sent to me. It doesn't require any comment from me, except to point out that I've never been to Montana, and Joey hadn't, either - largely because there are no professional baseball teams in Montana, and wherever we went on summer vacations with our parents, we had to go see a baseball game. So we went to Denver and LA and San Francisco and St Louis and Kansas City and Philadelphia and Chicago, but never Montana.

We both expected that we would, eventually, go there - and I always assumed that when I did, it'd be with him.


Driving Montana, Alone
by Katie Phillips

I smile at the stack of Bob Dylan CDs
you are not holding in the passenger seat.
Storm clouds have gathered. My "Wow" rises
over the harmonica for your benefit,
but you cannot see that one sunlit peak

in the midst of threatening sky. The road turns
wet at the "Welcome to Anaconda" sign,
and I pat my raincoat, loosely folded
where your lap should be. "Anaconda was almost
the state capital," I say, but that's all I know,

and you don't ask for more. You wouldn't mind
my singing and swerving onto the shoulder
for more snapshots over the car door.
And it's only when I get just south of Philipsburg
that your not being here feels like absence.

I want you to see these dark rotting barns,
roadkill of Highway One. It seems only you
could know why my eyes fill the road
with tears again when a flock of swallows
swoops through an open barn door
and rushes out the gaping roof.