JEANNE JULIAN

The Drive to Work

The drive to work
takes me past fields and farmhouses.
Perennials blaze and white shorts glow
on young girls waiting for the bus
beside mailboxes with their tiny upright flags.

I have been a good girl. And waiting.
When does the bus come
to take me to the picnic?
When does the giant hand tender
the bone-shaped biscuit?

The boss gone on vacation, leaving
cigar smell filed in every drawer.
Whenever the phone rings,
voices say to me Good morning.
May we drive you to distraction?

Mea culpa, I’m already there.
Meanwhile, back in Ohio,
that trite state I left behind,
a divorced man rides a mower,
drives in tightening circles

through overgrown grass, lawn 
sloping from a brick house. This silage 
sweetens a sappy dream—of a call 
I make. To him. The bright ring
he cannot hear. More dream:

There, I would hang laundry
wearing clothes my mother wore.
There, I would pick strawberries.
There, I would spend money on décor.
There, maybe a baby, napping on a chenille coverlet.

As if these choices were, elsewhere, impossible.
As if I wanted them.

When young, I did not know
significance could die before death.