Do you remember that day
We go in your old Volvo after class
And drove west out into west of nowhere
Passing a museum about dinosaurs
And their place in western Mass.
Until we found that old, small town
That belonged in another era,
With small houses, and small streets
And signs on the doors giving various history degrees.
The music you played didn’t fit
With the scenes we passed,
Children on bikes that laughed at us
As we stared down their streets
Hands over eyes like explorers
Notebooks out and ready like cartographers
Pens tips chewed in the ends of our mouths
Like the writers we wanted to be.
And It was all fun and games
Until we had to turn around,
In that corn field of all places,
That seemed to never end,
Because it was fall and the corn stalks yellowed
And I imagined they would have crunched under our feet
In the cool autumn air
I breathed through the open window.
You went deer-in-the-headlights
As some farmer came by in his truck
And you started joking
-Until fear start creeping-
“This is the end for us,”
Because it looked like something from a film
Where two college kids die alone in a cornfield,
****** unsolved
Scythe found with no prints
The beginning of a bad movie script.
But we lived,
Because he gave us directions back home
Back to route 93
Or 94, or 270
Where we parted for one of our final times
Before you left for the big city,
Losing this memory to history
Like all those little houses
And all their little families.
