Route 684, Southbound Rest Stop

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment. If there was any outward sign of regalia It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then, A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip, It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — Have poured themselves back and forth, because On one side we are tinted by remembering the other. But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat. As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — Just at that moment as I was returning to the car A woman came the other way, her two young daughters Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry, They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called the days of great usefulness, making life as nice As she could for them, always writing the best story, And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth. I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat, Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back. Tell me we really had those girls, I said, and that they held my hands like that. When I got home I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was Later than she had hoped — then reading Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.