“Pop’s Happy Land and Truck Stop”

The ballad of Grundy County isn’t sung.
It isn’t even written down, not yet,
Unless you’re of a mind to see the need
That rises in a woman’s heart, a waitress
There at the truck stop on the interstate.
If you could see how such a thoroughfare
Is like a promise, offering the world
A welcome it cannot deliver, you
Would recognize the rhythm of it all,
How strains of it are ringing here and there.

The waitress might believe in history
If she had learned in school that towns like this
Have always grown around a dock, a port,
A trading post, a watering hole where boys
Forever favor the men who fathered them,
The men who stop for gas and food and leave
A part of them that leads to restlessness,
A state of mind that loves the loud machines
Coursing from boundary to boundary.
But such a history is dead to her.
Reality for her is like a story,
One that refuses to accept the past
And has no future, only now, today
Where truckers slap her on the ass and laugh.
When she was young, she saw all fifty states
By riding with a trucker she had met.
A year went by and she was still not free.
She ended up in Tennessee for good
And never notices the bus depot
Across the street where Greyhound passengers
Descend in single file and mill around.
They smoke one cigarette a-piece then leave.
You’d think she never notices because
Of being too distracted by the truckers
Behind the dusty, two-inch window blinds.
But if you watched her eyes and how they land
On certain things and not on too much else,
You’d know she chooses not to see the bus.
Is it an instinct or a conscious thing?
Which ever one, you’d know that if your life
Were slinging hash with chicken strips and gravy
You would never look at buses either.
If your husband lived on disability
And meals of homemade methamphetamine,
You’d hear the music on the radio
Come in and out. The Nashville sound would pass
Right through your heart in waves, in megahertz,
Resolving nothing but the seventh chords.

WILMER MILLS will be the Nick Barker Writer in Residence at Covenant College in 2011. He was recently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for two years. His poems were recently anthologized in The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.