NEBRASKA: KOOSER CHALLENGES MY DRIVING HABITS

So This is Nebraska

by Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

"So This Is Nebraska" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

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I have driven through Nebraska several times, mostly on the way to somewhere else. For this reason, I have not looked as carefully as I might have at what the State had to offer.  Kooser made me see what I had missed seeing before in Nebraska--as I travelled there--but always going "through."

I wander how much of my life has been spent that way,  just "driving through,"  so to speak, on my way to somewhere else, a "somewhere else" defined by my parents, my ego, my family, my colleagues and friends, my society, my employer, my religion, my political party, my avarice, my need for control, for power-money-prestige, the temptations to have or be "more," my need to feel secure in a world that I see (often in desperation) as unchanging, immutable, and subject to my 'wise' manipulations (or magical thinking).

The other morning when I heard Garrison Keillor read Kooser's poem on  The Writers Almanac (sent to my Email daily by PBS), I was brought up short--not so much by pondering what I had missed in my various trips through Nebraska as by what I had missed in my life while so busily, and often blindly,  speeding "somewhere else," often at breakneck speed. This, in turn, caused me to reflect on and suffer for the folks I may have hurt along the way, intentionally as well as by neglect. And my ponderings then led me to wonder--tinged with momentary regret--about how much richer my life might have been had I lived it with the poet's sensitivity to what was happening beside the road--off in the fields--in the barns and homes and stores that I passed while speeding off to destinations that I deemed to be so important at the time.

I guess I am compelled to rethink both the experience of the routes I've taken as well as the value of the destinations I targeted. It may not be too late to make course changes.