UTOPIA IS NO MORE A PLACE THAN NIRVANA IS 

 

Some meditators
have reported
that they were transported
out of the body…
     —George A. Maloney, S.J.

I round a curve, again speeding
beyond the limit, folded map
worry pestered me to stop for
unopened on the seat.

Fog overfills the hollows, long
tendrils overflowing, finding
the paths of least resistance,
hillocks rising above it all,
tightening rows climbing each
round hill in contour lines
of stubble, cornstalks stacked
in brown shocks, the one stalk
exactly meeting the resistance
of another, in a precise tension
that has the shocks steepling
the roundedness of hillocks.
Once, the Great Experiment
had such a hope for Utopia.

My giving in to worry times my
arrival on U.S. 30 with a black
buggy’s whoaing up on a dirt
side road, blinkered spirited
dark bay fighting too tight
a rein, elegant head whipping,
wisps of white eddying up,
pink working of the tongue
too painfully conspicuous.

Standing miniatures, one hers,
one his, tightly grip their
Mutti’s seat back, leaning to
peek around her caped shoulders.

Mutti, in the black of her poke
bonnet, directs the directest
of unmatronly looks my way.

And I inescapably know what
looking into the unguardedness
of an iconoclast’s eyes does
to a sometimes imagist who’s
drawn by the openness of her
look, and can’t believe what he’s
seeing: himself transported,
not exactly bodily, outside
himself, a momentous instant
of exultation before what I
think is my consciousness is
also transported.

When I’m back to my old boring
mundane self, the one woman
who’s seen me for what I am is
leaning out and looking as if
she, also, can’t get enough of
what she sees, and, also, wonders
about impossible possibilities
that can never be, small, tiny,
forever lost from out of my side
rearview mirror as I speed
to the City of Brotherly Love.