That’s How Far I’d Drive for It
For the poet H.G., who never published her poems
I’m in the car with Helen, supreme guide to proceeding otherwise.
My relatives refused to travel hours for a rhubarb, but Helen said, why get out of bed, if not for a private quest of minor significance to anyone else?
It’s a question of libido, she said, sometimes you wake up craving sex.
Other days a hunger comes for shoveling, to dig up whatever your relatives deem worthless.
All it takes to stymie a private quest is one fallen tree over the road.
To proceed we had to turn back, resign ourselves to the winding nature of progress.
We drove once more through Tyrone, a township of farms and tire stores, a garage in which a boy burned his eyebrows off tinkering with wires under a car and became my grandfather.
I was named for someone before him, who didn’t begin her life here, never learned to write in English, yet still managed to plant something that perennially thickened, red and edible.
Beneath us, the cement ended on a road with no name.
Over rutted gravel, we discussed what was compelling us to continue—if it was libidinal, or if it was something simpler, mere stubbornness.
We didn’t bother talking about being lost; we had no hunger for stating the obvious.
Helen said maybe a fellow human would appear if we played better music.
We belted Tina Turner and it worked. We found humanity—a woman exiting a house, a man behind her with a stripe of hair like a skunk tail.
These are the people, Helen said. They will know what we need to know.
In ten minutes, they delivered us.
We reached the yard where my namesake’s rhubarb returned, unbidden, for a century.
My father scoffed at so much gas and distance for a plant I could buy at any garden store.
My stepmother predicted futility, said whatever I did or not, the rhubarb would die on the long hot ride to the home I’ve chosen elsewhere.
But the real question, Helen said, is how your family lived these hours instead.
Are they dancing right now, are they singing “Nutbush City Limits” with Ike and Tina? Are they making out, even considering taking off their clothes?
Trisha Brown said: Dance is a disruption of the everyday.
See also: the ineffable; what stirred Helen to join me, to refine her gorgeous poems and pile them in a drawer.
A year later, she nearly died.
Recalling her near-death, Helen spoke of our trip, bringing our bodies all those miles to a stranger’s yard.
To break up the ground around the root clumps we’d come for, the owner jumped onto the step of his shovel.
He gave me a shovel to use my weight and jump as well—a duo disruption of the everyday.
While we circled and loosened the earth, we said nothing, spoke only in gestures.
It was a dance as transcendent as anything I’ve purchased tickets to attend.
Helen almost died at 4:30 am on a solo drive to a flea market.
She forgot to click her seatbelt, had taken a sleeping pill that caused a blackout in the car.
Yet the blackout didn’t end her.
A lack of audience for her poems didn’t either.
The rhubarb didn’t perish on its hot travel over various states to new ground.
Its leaves have grown broad as the ears of elephants, as the living elements of ancestral presence I’d been craving.
My son churned its ruddiest stalks into sorbet.
He chopped up its petioles with strawberries into pies.
Meaning is a hunger. Some of us need to eat and eat it.
I’ve got a bridge to show you, Helen told me after she didn’t die.
The most magnificent bridge collapse into a muddy river you’ve ever seen, she said.
To really sate the libido for symbolic experience, she said, we could strip and swim right under it.
