Kurt Brown: Road Trip

The new road runs along the old road. I can see it
still imprinted on the earth, not twenty feet away
as I drive west past silos and farmsteads, fruit stands and hogs.
Once in Kansas, I stood in a field and watched
the stars on the horizon revolve around my ankles.
People are always moving, even those standing still
because the world keeps changing around them, changing them.
When will the cities meet? When will they spread until
there is a single city—avenue to avenue, coast to coast?
What we call “the country” is an undeveloped area
by the side of the road. There is no “country,” there is no “road.”
It’s one big National Park, no longer the wilderness it was.
But the old world exists under the present world
the way an original painting exists under a newer one.
The animals know: their ancient, invisible trails cross
and re-cross our own like scars that have healed long ago.
Their country is not our country but another place altogether.
Anything of importance there comes out of the sky.
In Amarillo the wind tries to erase everything, even the future.
It swoops down to scrape the desert clean as a scapula.
Here among bones and bleached arroyos the sun leans
through my window at dawn to let me know
I’m not going anywhere. There’s no more anywhere to go.

From I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New (Tiger Bark Press). Copyright 2014 by the estate of Kurt Brown. Included in Vox Populi by permission of Laure-Anne Bosselaar-Brown.

Bio:

Kurt Brown (1944-2013) was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up on Long Island and in Connecticut. Brown was a highly regarded poet, editor, and literary activist. He founded the Aspen Writer’s Conference, now called Summer Words, in 1976. It was there that he met his wife, Belgian-American poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Brown later wrote an account of this period, entitled Lost Sheep: Aspen’s Counterculture in the 1970s—A Memoir (Conundrum Press, 2012). He was the author of several full-length poetry collections, including I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New (Tiger Bark Press). He was also a prolific editor and compiled several poetry anthologies, including Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Everyman’s Library, 2011). With Laure-Anne Bosselaar, he edited Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars (Milkweed Editions, 1997) and translated The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck (Oberlin College Press, 2006). A founding director of AWP’s Writers’ Conferences & Centers, he also served on the boards of Sarabande Books and of Poets House. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Georgia Tech, and Westminster College and lived most recently in Santa Barbara, California.