Sunday, October 23, 2016

Poem for Sunday and Brookside Gardens

Driving in Oklahoma
By Carter Revard

On humming rubber along this white concrete,
lighthearted between the gravities
of source and destination like a man
halfway to the moon
in this bubble of tuneless whistling
at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,
over prairie swells rising
and falling, over the quick offramp
that drops to its underpass and the truck
thundering beneath as I cross
with the country music twanging out my windows,
I'm grooving down this highway feeling
technology is freedom's other name when
—a meadowlark
comes sailing across my windshield
with breast shining yellow
and five notes pierce
the windroar like a flash
of nectar on mind,
gone as the country music swells up and drops
                        me wheeling down
                      my notch of cement-bottomed sky
                        between home and away
and wanting
to move again through country that a bird
has defined wholly with song,
and maybe next time see how
                        he flies so easy, when he sings.

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It was a gorgeous, cool Saturday, so after a morning of chores and catch-up from the stuff that didn't get done while we were away Thursday, we had lunch and went to Brookside Gardens. The trees are more than a week behind where they were last year in terms of fall color, but that's fine with me -- I like my autumn to last past Thanksgiving! The chrysanthemums in the conservatory and gardens were only just starting to bloom, but there were lots of fall flowers, plus turtles and geese.

















We stopped at Roots Market since we were already halfway there and got my favorite vegan steak bites, veggie cheese, and a local brand of butterbeer that's yummy. Then we came home and almost got to see Alice and Jeremy, first because we were going to make dinner plans and then because their car battery died, but they found a jump from someone else and by then they needed to get Avery home. So we had peanut soup and cheese for dinner, followed by a lovely evening watching Maryland beat Michigan State!

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