Shades

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1997 by Shirley, Aleda

It takes more than a door painted blue

to keep the ghosts away. All you have to do

is live long enough and they will come.

Beside the interstate the old road still ran,

though it ended abruptly in a field of sage and mist.

That road seemed like the future: an emptiness

that could turn, at any moment; into beauty.

I stopped in a small town in Oklahoma

a liquor store in a bad neighborhood,

old men and teenagers standing around out front,

a radio crackling in the dry wind.

Did the old men come this far and stop?

Smoke from their cigarettes disappeared an instant later.

In the darkness nothing was visible but the darkness.

By dawn the road was the color of silk

gone orchid or violet when tilted to the light,

the trees on the side of the road permanently twisted

from the wind off the plains. On that leg they bent

toward me. I stood some distance from the car and felt

the dry air whipping my skirt around my legs.

I realized I'd forgotten too little about my life,

that there was in sleep and inattention a kind of salvation

and I wanted to be saved because I no longer believed

any one place was different from any other.

Being haunted means you never feel wholly abandoned,

and as I drove past the blinded diners and the shells of old trucks,

I gathered it close to me, all of it, and went on.