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Jordan Smith: Ducktail
For Nathan Bell
First ride from the college girl in a Saab who told him
About the albino deer in the posted woods
Around the nuclear storage dump,
And then two women in golf clothes
Who ignored him until the junction of 5 & 20
And then, just past Auburn Correctional,
In the parking lot of the redwood-sided bar
After a burger and a beer in a frosted mug,
He waited an hour and a half before
The chrome-and-maroon Buick swings over
And a guy, mid-thirties, ducktail and short-sleeved
Work shirt with the cigarette pack rolled in the cuff
Just like in the B-movies, said get in,
Must be rough, no one picks up anyone near a prison,
And you only get one mistake, and this just
Might be mine, he thought when the guy pulled over,
Stopped at a dirt road junction, but all he said
Was, you got a license? I’m drunk, and I can’t
Get pulled over again. Drive me to Kossow’s,
You know, that bar outside of Fishers
So I can talk to my brother a couple of minutes,
And then you can drive yourself wherever you want,
And like a lot of road stories, he’d go on, there’s
No punch line, except that he knew Kossow’s Triangle,
A two-room tavern built right in the center
Of a three-way junction, and if he took the road
South through Fishers, he’d end up at the Cottage
Hotel, and if he was lucky that kid with the resonator
Who’d learned the blues from Son House
Between factory shifts in Rochester
Would play a set, and those were the stories
He liked to tell, but he left out the one with the cop,
The dope, and traffic stop to look for guns in Ohio
Or the one when, on his way to hear Gary Snyder
Read, the driver hit a dog and wept, and the drunk
Rastafarian with the red-headed girl in the moth-
Green Plymouth Valiant, but if you want
A good story, he told me, I mean one
You can take to heart, don’t ask anyone
With one foot out the car door, and when
I wondered about the guy’s brother, he answered,
What do you think? He wasn’t there. We drank
Black Velvet and ginger for the whole two hours
We spent remembering everywhere we didn’t have to go.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Jordan Smith
Jordan Smith’s many books include Little Black Train, winner of the 2019 Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and Salmagundi.
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Thank you for these kind responses. — J
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Thanks for the kind responses. — Jordan
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What a world is created in this poem! It’s why I love poetry #78
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Narrative poetry at its compressed best. I have a short film in my head now, one with its own soundtrack of what Frost called “sentence sounds.” Bravo!
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I agree, Richard!
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I am pulled in by the casual tone and prosy nature of this poem. He makes it look easy to write in this off-the-cuff piece. It’s so inspiring for any of us who”ve written about experiences in the good old days.
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Thanks, Deborah.
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I like this story better. When a friend and I tried to hitch back to UCSD in La Jolla, we got picked up by a professor who sternly lectured us all the way. I’ll save the one that could have been worse for another day.
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I mean I liked it better than my story, sighhh
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What a storyteller, takes me way back to a different time and another country. Thank you!
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A very American story, no? Huckleberry Finn, On the Road, Travels with Charlie?
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It is cleansing of mind and spirit to read this on my way out to plant a field in ryegrass seed this morning, going this early, 7:17AM so I can see my trail and my runs will be spot on, like the prosaic journey laid through these words, so unlike my “now.” So what? So we live (and die) by stories. And this story is grand! Blessed be!
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Even your comments are poems, Sean. You are amazing.
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I love this poem with its echoes of Kerouac and my own youth hitchhiking across America.
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