Adventures Everywhere
Selling cookies to buy books for school
I traveled over to a small town and met
A woman
Gardening gloves, graying hair
who told me in her parlor
the tales my father had
That the Frontier was not yet dead.
She told me she had traveled the world
on the spare change in her pockets
Tickets and passports lined her walls
Her bookshelves bare, her stories fully-fleshed
She talked of Mexico and Timbuktu
Paris, Kentucky to Paris, France
Sunsets of Asian mountain peaks
And the Amazon's many plants
But she caught me by surprise when
Her most amazing find
was thirty miles from her little town
A man who didn't believe in reality
or today, really.
The man, sun-baked skin, free-flowing hair,
Never left the confines of his familiar city limits
Yet he traveled the world on
Strong currents of written word
He trusted those words to tell him the truth
Take him to places he couldn't go
On a minimum-wage pay
Worthless money was traded for cherished
Fabulous adventures bound in books
They occupied his car, his tractor, his bed.
He said the world was always a-changing itself
Why skip the show from the front porch?
She met him and he met her
At first they fell into fights
But then she gave up her adventures
For a new adventures spent with him
Opening her irises to something unfamiliar.
They married and watched over
Twenty chubby toes.
The man took much care to restrain their heads
like balloons, from floating into space.
But the mother worked in the dark
To encourage them to dream.
The man died-
suicide-
and the kids were far off
when I walked up to the door.
She was planning a big trip, she said,
Yet she wouldn't say to where
And bought all the cookies I had
Her frail hand trembling with the money
but her smile confident and proud.
Then, she told me to be an adventure
Imaginary or not
As she took off her dusty shoes
Carrying the earth on their soles.
