From Maine to Florida

Mind you I have miles to go before I sleep

and miles to go

and miles

and who knows

where they lead,

but here in Florida, now,

I am living

for the first time in my life

with no family nearby

even as I plot

in vain,

to change that later in the year,

and I wonder if I can stand it,

if I can stand on ceremony

and live my life 

this way,

the way I always wanted it,

the way I never wanted it

after my niece,

the way that gives me so much time

but takes so much away,

the distance where love is,

the space that should not exist

cannot be traversed

even in a phone

adequately,

this migrant heart,

this migrant soul,

lost in the byways of life,

I suppose,

like anyone else,

the true American dream,

that hope that somewhere on the horizon

there will be something that might satisfy...

From Virginia to Maine

The last time I lived in Maine

is also the happiest time

I've ever lived there,

a miracle season

I shared with my niece,

traveling a mobile home,

roadways to parks,

around the park itself,

sometimes just playing with the sand

left there from the winter months

and never collected,

or the puddles left by rain

or the soccer balls left outside

or the model homes

we could waste time inside

or thew families who would let us play with them,

or the snow,

or the bounteous snow,

or that time we lost heat

and gained layers,

the pond I named in her honor,

since it was never given one...

This was also the last time to date

I've gotten to spend time

with my nephews there,

the trips down to Freeport,

free of care,

knowing how much they loved

spending time with me,

which I still find

unaccountable.

From Florida to Virginia

The other life my sister shared with me

was the family I found

in Virginia,

which I treasure to this day

and always will,

while living in an RV

that was at that point

anchored in one spot.

There I made friends

with a homeless man

who lived in a tent

and once swung a sword

at the feet of someone,

which sadly remains

the only anecdote

of any kind

with a sword

I can share.

From Maine to Florida

The first time I went to Florida

changed my life forever,

the first time I took responsibility

for a young child's life,

not just any child's

but my niece,

and that was a journey

in and of

itself.

Story for another time;

story of a lifetime.

From Colorado to Maine

And then I headed

back to Maine,

where I recouped some fortunes

and watched my mother die,

and it's still mostly the latter

that defines this period,

the road to a different era,

where all roads lead,

really.

From Massachusetts to Colorado

In contrast,

Colorado Springs

always had the instinct

to swallow me whole,

regardless of how hard I tried,

and I lived there

longer than anywhere else

except home

and now here in Tampa,

so this is from considerable experience,

not vague transitory impression

or transient reductionism.

I went there with hope,

where hope would spring eternal,

and maybe it was disappointment

that defined the outcome.

...Then again,

I never did appreciate

just how many bookstores

there were there.

Perhaps

my vagaries

are a purgatory.

From Maine to Massachusetts

The first time I truly lived somewhere

other than home

was in Burlington, Massachusetts.

The day before I headed out,

I have no problems admitting

I cried.

But it was there,

really,

I truly began to appreciate

getting to discover

what there was to find

in new environs.

I still like to believe

I found a lot of what was available

around me,

not just that spot

where the Founding Fathers hid,

or the house owned by that loyalist,

or the reservoir,

not even the remnant of Victoria Station

(which I ridiculously sing about to this day)

...All of it, basically.

I made that place home.

Madawaska

In yon olden days

before the crush for absolute efficiency,

my dad's job

had him on the road

virtually indefinitely,

the reason we moved to Maine,

so he could make trips

to places like Madawaska

and it would seem

slightly more reasonable,

but while he was gone

it never really occurred to me

at the time

that he had a whole life

until he talked about it years later,

and recently

I took some notes,

recording familiar anecdotes,

such as the priest who mistook him for a priest

because of the suitcase he took to mass one day.

Someday I make the trip

to Madawaska.

From Maine to Maine

The haul up to Orono

was still long, mind you,

but it was considerably shorter

than the one to Erie,

and incidentally,

logged in most of the time

I've personally

spent behind a wheel

(and also by far my favorite).

In some alternate life

I ended up living in Bangor,

which by the way

ought to rhyme

with "bang her,"

not the way

I always pronounced it.

From Maine to Erie

My dad's job literally used to be

traveling long distances,

once we got to Maine,

all the way to Madawaska,

so when he started to complain

about the trip to Erie,

you knew it was a long slog.

My oldest brother

was the one

who initiated those trips

when he was accepted

to Mercyhurst,

but I spent my freshmen year there, too,

but my dad,

who by the way

spent many years

occasionally making the trip

down to New Jersey

so we could hang out

with our favorite relatives,

finally had enough of that,

and so that came to an end.

From Maine to Rhode Island

In my first decade

we traveled back to Rhode Island

so often

it was a regular way of life

to spend long stretches of time

on the road.

We visited my mom's dad

and her family

but also my dad's

over in nearby Blackstone,

which later it was made clear

in the short walks we could take

from one to the other,

which might be

one of the secret origins

of why I walk so much

today.

From Rhode Island to Maine

I'm pretty sure

it was 1983

when the Laplumes packed up

and moved to Maine.

Like my mother's side,

we lived in Rhode Island,

and although I don't remember

except the plastic Budweiser mug my dad used to have,

much about living in Rhode Island,

I remember packing the moving van

and heading off to Maine,

moving into the apartment in Lewiston,

the whole process

of the house of Dumas Street,

which was virtually empty

when we got there,

being built

from the ground up

(and the beer cans,

and the smell of beer

those cans left

in their wake).

They always say

you can't rely 

on the early memories

of the young,

but they exist.

Maine Before Maine

I've never been good enough

at listening to the stories

my family tells

about family history,

and I'm forever beating myself up

about this.

I've listened to my dad's stories

countless times,

about how his dad

used to come up to Maine

to fish.

This was before our family,

my family,

moved to Maine.

My dad grew up in Massachusetts;

when I've tried to research

his family tree,

I think I find his missing grandfather

in Maine,

and really,

this isn't so mysterious;

Maine used to belong

to Massachusetts,

after all,

and they're both snug up in New England,

which people in New England

have a much different idea about

than probably anyone else

in the country.

But still,

on the intimate scale,

it's interesting to think

of the prehistory

sitting there,

wondering if it ever occurred

to my grandfather

so live in Maine,

the way his son would,

the way I did,

and will perhaps,

the heart ever fond

of previous things,

again.

The last time we spoke about it,

he said they fished

on an Indian reservation,

which probably means

Penobscot.

I'll have to wait

or outright ask,

which lake.

Anyway, 

this is to say,

even if your memory

struggles to grasp

the details,

try and listen

when your family speaks

about its history.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Anyone taking a deep dive

into my poetry

will know

I hold Robert Pirsig

in considerable esteem;

there has never been a philosopher

who has held greater fascination

for me.

He wrote two books,

both of them personal journeys,

the first of which

still holds cult status

as he tries to explain

his relationship with his son

through motorcycles,

something we still mistake

as the realm

of roving gangs in leather

with fancy club names

and possibly undeserved reputations.

Pirsig was a scholar,

the last of a previous breed,

who talked of chautauquas,

a more civilized version

of later hippy culture

that perhaps greater emphasized

the culture aspect,

a circus for the mind,

not hallucinogenic

but expanding its potential

to learn,

what we now think

only institutions behind walls

can provide.

Sometimes you lose something

by locking it away permanently

somewhere.

Pirsig may have struggled

to reach his conclusions

but it was worth it.

Oh, it was worth it.

And the freedom he found

was, and still is,

out there.

Blue Highways

In college

I discovered and began to read

the travelogs of William Least Heat-Moon,

his journeys

by van

boat

large scale

and small,

across America,

his piercing into the communities

where he found regular people

who didn't mind sharing their lives with him

and in term, 

with his readers.

I kind of think

there'd be a better bond

between us

if more people

shared these blue highways

with him

and each other.

Route 66

So prevalent

was the casual driving vacation

when people just wanted

to vacation in their car

before destinations were something to reach

that roads were covered in attractions,

not the morbid curiosities

roadtrippers will know today,

but the treasures 

of Route 66,

where communities formed,

where today

only ghost towns exist.

A short lament.

The Highway Robbers

By highway robbers,

I don't mean metaphorically speaking,

or highways,

but the classic bandits

like Jesse James

who scoured the railways

and looted trains

of their precious cargo,

whose fetes of daring

made infamy

famous,

romanticized

in pop culture

the way we've kind of desperatyely sought

in fiction

these last couple decades

since no one 

is interested

in the real world

anymore

(leaving the outlaw's descendants

into the social media

of the anonymous horde).

Make of that what you will.

The Railroad Barons

Another thing

difficult to recall

would be

how the railroad barons

were the real estate giants

of their day,

when real estate

was the real estate

of those putting down all those tracks,

buying up land

along those lines

out from under folks

to develop not cities

but a whole country.

Even the Pinkertons existed

because of these guys,

watching out for saboteurs

and other intrigue

the way later eras

would look at everything else.

And now

all this exists

only in cliffhanger fiction.

The Horse, the Train, and the Car

One of my favorite factoids

is that horses aren't

indigenous

to the Americas,

that an animal

we associate

so closely

with our lands

was a migrant, too.

(Although really

in the final analysis,

everything is.)

And anyway,

what so seldom gets acknowledged

is just how much space

there is

in the United States,

how we tend

like so many countries

to fixate

on the mass population centers

and minimize the sparse,

even denigrate those citizens

as inconsequential,

backwards,

which is funny,

and ironic,

and in all other ways

a curious way

to interpret them,

since both the rich and the poor

dream of ample land

in which to dwell,

and it's only in cities

where land is scarce,

is always at a premium,

and where expansion

never seems to be

enough.

A digression.

So when they were introduced,

horses came in handy,

and then in the 19th century,

rail lines revolutionized

...everything,

as radical as the horses ever were,

and then the car showed up soon after

(and really, not so much later, planes,

but aside from leisure and business,

their immediate applications

serve different ends),

and cars, more than anything,

came to dominate,

at one point so heavily promoted

they shaped the entire nation,

redefined everything,

a car nation,

in tarnation.

One can't properly understand

the migrant culture,

here,

without considering these cars.

Also, just as a sidenote,

just try and picture

any of this

without the invisible truckers,

the moving vans

and the ones

who spend their lives

hucking all our goods;

you really only notice

if they take forever,

with all your possessions

or somehow lose something,

never to be explained,

the true poltergeists

of America...

And Its Companion, Too

Even when it's actually brought up,

the fact that France

has an identical statue

as a bossom companion

never seems to strike anyone

as meaning anything.

No one posts pictures

in France

of this sibling rival,

no one breathes significance

into its existence,

no one says it means something

to the people of France

as ours does to us

and to the world,

to the migrants

it inspires,

and the nation it represents.

I always kind of wonder

about that.