USA

snapshot@bluemarble.net 

Joy in the Midwest

1
Coming around a curve
and down one of those
rolling Indiana hills
just outside Bloomington

(45 south, to be exact)

my windshield frames
two burros, one llama,
and maybe the bluest
barn in the Ohio Valley.

2
Sitting on what's saved,
four thick chunks
cut from its
mottled trunk,

we drink beer
between versions
of the storm that
took the sycamore.

3
This evening in Indiana,
spring breeze
cooling my coffee,
my mouth is sweet
with Mexican wedding cakes.

Once, in San Miguel de Allende,
I went from a cheap hotel
where mosquitoes sang all night
in a blood-frenzy
over my sheet-covered head

to the Hotel Vista Hermosa
where dysentery kept me
four days in bed
eating cooked carrots
and drinking Coke.

Thirty years later...
and it's still good to be home.

Weather

From southern Illinois
a friend writes of thunder
and lightning in a snow storm,
a rare occurrence, like his letter.
He writes about a woman
who had a baby in a car
stuck along the highway,
people without heat or light,
while he and his wife
ate roast beef by candlelight
in their new house, drank beer
and Cherry Heering and afterwards 
looked out over the deck
at a white universe. He closes,
"Come visit. You can't have a
feeling for us till you see
our new surroundings."

I write back in the middle
of an ice storm and the last 
solar eclipse of this century.
He answers quickly
with word of rising water
threatening his new house,
worried that the spring melt
will only make things worse.
Mid-April I post a quick card
about a close brush with a tornado,
some missing shingles,
the neighbor's apple tree snapped
like a bread stick. 
He counters
with a four-pager bewailing the damage
from knuckle-sized hail, straight-line winds.
Earthquake, I write back, a tremor
while talking on the phone...
And then,
after a period of silence,
he writes from New Mexico--
Santa Fe. A postcard with a cow's
skull. They've moved, he says.
Come see us. Picture perfect.
Day in...day out. Come see us.

© All Copyright, 2000, Roger Pfingston.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.