The Crossroads
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
Hello Friends —
A trigger, one most people might not notice, sparks a particular sequence of your neurons firing. Do you have a trigger like that, one that brings the same sharp memory back over and over? It could be an intersection. It could be a day of the year. It could be a word.
The poet Joshua Mehigan is so strict to form in this piece — every line exactly 10 syllables; every line end-stopped in a whole, perfect rhyme; no dashes, no italics, no indentation — you don’t have to count syllables to hear the plain rigidness; it’s like he’s just white-knuckled clinging to basic structure, to have something regular and certain to hang onto. For me, it’s how tightly you can feel Mehigan clinging — that conversational but stalted, redundant tone — that enable him to convey the common characteristic of traumas that still come back to us over and over: a sense of something amorphous unexplained or unresolved — you’ve got many sharp little details, and yet still somehow they don’t add up. That’s why it’s still following you around, still getting triggered, precisely because there is something about it you still don’t have words for. I’d argue this is a poem about not having words — about that feeling of knowing there is something that you have not named, but also still not having the name for it.
In the meantime, you do have these words, these eight lines, you can hear going round in your head every time that trigger goes off. Stalted, redundant, simple, jagged — it might not sound like the most flattering description for a poem, but for me that’s exactly what makes this little piece drop-dead gorgeous.
“Crossroads” appeared in Poetry magazine (Feb. 2010).
Cheers,
Ellen