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Bernie Schmitt

Highway Commuter

 

Armed with caffeine-induced vigilance,

I laugh at Bob and Tom’s radio show

and people who stuff their faces

with fast-food breakfasts, as wrappers dangle

in their steering wheels.

 

Windshield-framed faces are yapping away

on cell phones and nodding

like bobble-head dolls,

in air-conditioned mini-vans, Hummers,

and black Ford sedans like mine.

 

Summer’s heavy haze droops the tasseled tops

of Indiana corn in rolling fields of deep green.

I’m alert to drivers deficient in dexterity,

and blue-shirted cops with Canadian Mountie hats

hiding in the cool shadows of roadside brush.

 

Orange and white plastic barrels

and arrows and dust swirl into an amalgam

of desperation and impatience,

when limits on speed drive some

to ride my bumper.

 

I watch and I wait and I sigh,

perhaps like others, as wheels spin

beneath me, a constant hum

hurtling along the blistery asphalt,

to destinations separate and distinct—

and sometimes unknown.

 

 

 

Family Reunion

“Who’s the Asian girl?”

my adopted Vietnamese cousin exclaims,

making us laugh when our large family

of German Catholic ancestry is photographed,

for a reunion that isn’t often enough.

 

Kim was an orphan of that once-tortured country,

a baby when my aunt and uncle brought her home

to their farm in Indiana, sometime in the seventies,

when I didn’t care about family like I do today,

even if I feel as out of place as Kim looks in that picture.

 

But the longer I’m here the more comfortable I become

around people I should know, but I don’t, and I can’t explain why.

I shake hands with my uncles and I hug my aunts,

mostly due to respect, but maybe out of love.

Embraces among shared blood are genuine.

 

We fill ourselves with samplings of potato salad,

vegetable medleys and rye bread, our hands waving flies

away from our food as we gesture and tell stories, our fingers greasy

from tearing into chicken that was roasted under a maple tree,

near Rubbermaid coolers filled with ice and beer.

 

German-chocolate cakes and puddings and berry cobblers

make us bloated and lazy and happy sitting under pine trees

that break a cooling breeze of an impending autumn.

Sunlight is sprinkled among the lawn chairs,

paper plates filled with chicken bones, and us.

 

My cousin Ted and I slap each other on the back,

drink our beers and laugh about our inherited baldness.

Kim’s husband looks more like us than she does,

and I wonder if she ever feels alone, among us,

when we have these reunions, that aren’t often enough.

 

 

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