two days ago, my father,
lost in Chicago he
said, called to ask if
Highway 60 would get you
to Interstate 94. I heard him repeat
the question twice, but I woke up
uneasy before I could answer.

Among the living, Dad was
rarely lost, and I found
it hard to believe he was
lost in my dreaming that night.

I remember trips when he drove and I was
the navigator and the point was
to use the map to choose
the least paved road

we thought the car could handle (and
we thought the car could handle
anything with time
and a patient driver).

My head has been full of maps
as long as I can remember, but I
couldn’t map a dream of my father lost
asking after two big roads that never cross
in the grid settlers etched on the surface of this island.

I have lived a stone’s throw from both roads
where one is named for Woody Guthrie
and the other (between Port Huron
and Montana) for Bishop Ford.

There must be some barely passable gravel road
between them, and I suppose the dream was
some kind of wake up call. They say

Highway 60 ended in Springfield
in 1926, where it met Route 66 (named
by some for Will Rogers) winding as the song says
from Chicago to LA. We used to meet there,
ten hours driving each, halfway between
Amarillo and Chicago.

Anyone who knows maps knows a map
will get you good and lost if it is
nothing but a grid settlers
wear settling on some surface.
It has to be personal. It has to be
about who is here, who is there, what we
mean by we when, whose mind is wandering

where. You can’t let it lie
flat. A statement of fact: We are
people of this generation, bred in at least
modest comfort, looking uncomfortably to the world

we think we
inherited,

the late Bishop of the Church of God
in Christ remembered between the place
the statement was made and the place a woman
who had the good sense to say no twice
long before I was born was
at home.

I remember her now, remember my father
never met a man he didn’t like, Will,
remember the place

I lived on the wild windy plains —
the end of the world, Granny said.

Then we’d sing a song and sing it
again, sit for an hour and not
say a word, imagine

another possible. No,
not unattainable (and — in
the next dream — I say
yes, in a way, yes.)