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How to Get to Muncie
If
you're coming from Route 70E,
take the beltway around Indianapolis then
69N
short of Cammack. It's a booger-flick from there.
You'll see signs about
the Gas Boom that failed
and State Championships teams that didn't.
All
along the flat land family grave sites,
drowning in flooded corn fields, will
sour
your stomach, but a sheet of frozen blue sky
will sweeten your memory
of skating.
Muncie is not a town you'd seek out, unless
you're an
aficionado of glass jars or a historian
of election corruption or recently hired to
teach
home economics at a middle school.
Get ready for window displays of
sod edgers,
roll-top desks, potted palms, and group pictures
of bible classes.
Occasionally, you'll see
black faces in a white crowd and faded prints
of the
Klan. A woman, it is touted, is now mayor.
If you're just passing through,
the road skirts
the university. Stop at Cycles, a campus pub.
Have a cold draft
and a Velvet Crunch baguette,
listen to poets at an open mike, talk to a
prof
who grew up here. Yes, in this town
we have stale Dots, moonshine
from a truck,
a slow drawl. But if, intrigued, you come to stay,
we'll show you
the real us: load-bearing,
complex as cave writings, smarter than lab
rats.
Raking
Leaves
He don't wear no sheet,
Charlie whispers, but he's Klan.
I
glance at fat man Hampton,
a sack of laundry,
but this noon my father
soaped my mouth
for spewing the S word on my busted thumb,
so Klan is
Charlie's worry-I'm brooding on injustice.
Anyway, Hampton seems safe, a
Santa at Kiwanis parties,
his wife shows Avon, both as popular as scrabble.
But Charlie's almost my best friend, an eye like Tonto's
(mother would
die-an old black handyman, what for?),
so I don my squint-hard mask when
Hampton walks up,
asks for matches, his smile a taut rope. I oblige.
He
sniffs at Charlie, turns away, as though he's smelled
sullage. Charlie leans on his
rake, scouting himself.
Is he being dragged through gravel, knees bouncing,
brain emptying, or garroted maybe, the way Shawnees?
I don't know. I rake
hard, track down outlaw leaves,
build my pyre, dive into autumn flames, rise
laughing,
my mouth full of chaff. Grim Charlie still leans.
He won't talk I can
see, won't fix my bike.
Injustice upon injustice the whole damn
day.