A longer poem today, my apologies for the demand on your attention, but give it a read when you have the time. It's actually just an excerpt from the very interesting Weldon Kees. If piqued, check out this piece by Anthony Lane. First I learn Dick Cavett is from Nebraska, and now Weldon Kees. This from Cavett's autobiography:

"There was so much about Nebraska, so much beauty and history, that I didn't fully appreciate when I was there. It was that stupid notion that if anything good has ever happened it couldn't have happened in my boring home state. I didn't realize until I left that Crazy Horse had been killed in Nebraska, that the major trails to the West - the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail - went through the state, that Lewis and Clark passed through, that Buffalo Bill's ranch was there, that the Red Cloud Agency had been there, that the Cheyenne came through the sand hills on their tragic attempt to regain their homeland, and that the first reports of Wounded Knee were telegraphed from Rushville. I even learned a few years ago, in reading Oscar Wilde's letters, that he was not only in Nebraska but in my home town of Lincoln, where - ironically, when you think of what was going to happen to him - he spoke of the forlorn looks of the prisoners in the penitentiary. If they taught us any of this in school, I was asleep. All I knew was that someone named William Jennings Bryan, who had lived in Lincoln, had once run for president, and I assumed that was all there was worth knowing."

Transcription NB; I nearly typed "washboard abs" instead of the proper "washboard roads."


from Travels in North America by Weldon Kees

And sometimes, shivering in St. Paul or baking in Atlanta,
The sudden sense that you have seen it all before:
The man who took your ticket at the Gem in Council Bluffs
Performed a similar function for you at the Shreveport Tivoli.
Joe's Lunch appears again, town after town, next door
To Larry's Shoe Repair, adjoining, inescapably, the Acme
Doughnut Shop.
Main, First, and Market fuse together.
Bert and Lena run the laundromat. John Foster, D.D.S.,
Has offices above the City Bank.-At three or four,
On winter afternoons, when school is letting out
And rows of children pass you, near the firehouse,
This sense is keenest, piercing as the wind
That sweeps you toward the frosted door of your hotel
And past the portly hatted traveler with moist cigar
Who turns his paper as you brush against the rubber plant.
You have forgotten singularities. You have forgotten
Rooms that overlooked a park in Boston, brown walls hung

With congo masks and Miros, rain
Against a skylight, and the screaming girl
Who threw a cocktail shaker at a man in tweeds
Who quoted passages from Marlowe and 'Tis Pity She's a
Whore.
You have forgotten yellow lights of San Francisco coming on,
The bridges choked with cars, and islands in the fog.
Or have forgotten why you left or why you came to where you
are,
Or by what roads and passages,
Or what it was, if anything, that you were hoping for.

Journeys are ways of marking out a distance,
Or dealing with the past, however ineffectually,
Or ways of searching for some new enclosure in this space
Between the oceans.-Now the smaller waves of afternoon re-
trace
This sand where breakers threw their cargoes up-
Old rafts and spongy two-by-fours and inner tubes,
The spines of sharks and broken codheads,
Tinned stuff with the labels gone, and yellow weeds
Like entrails; mattresses and stones, and, by a grapefruit crate,
A ragged map, imperfectly enclosed by seaworn oilskin.
Two tiny scarlet crabs run out as I unfold it on the beach.
Here, sodden, fading, green ink blending into blue,
Is Brooklyn Heights, and I am walking toward the subway
In a January snow again, at night, ten years ago. Here is
Milpitas,
California, filling stations and a Ford
Assembly plant. Here are the washboard roads
Of Wellfleet, on the Cape, and summer light and dust.
And here, now textured like a blotter, like the going years
And difficult to see, is where you are, and where I am,
And where the oceans cover us.