Route 684, Southbound Rest Stop

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment.

If there was any outward sign of regalia

It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then,

A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does

Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop

Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves

At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory

Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between

With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present

Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip,

It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — 

Have poured themselves back and forth, because

On one side we are tinted by remembering the other.

But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat.

As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — 

Just at that moment as I was returning to the car

A woman came the other way, her two young daughters

Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them

So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry,

They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning

The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize

Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called

the days of great usefulness, making life as nice

As she could for them, always writing the best story,

And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet

As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth.

I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat,

Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back.

Tell me we really had those girls, I said,

and that they held my hands like that. When I got home

I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was

Later than she had hoped — then reading

Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.