Rest Stop, Pittsfield (03)

There’s no there there. -- Gertrude Stein on Oakland
Be here now. -- Various sources

I am on the map, and my name is the red star
that tells the driver where the rest-stop is,
a star that says: here you are. And so I am,
between one there and another. A red line
traces routes there too – where’s the blue?

But I digress again. Hardly anyone is there
when I stop. Most all the time the restroom
is blocked with yellow signs that warn you off:
and no one is there who can explain to me
the warnings, why the restroom is so closed.

In summer, the fountain drips and drips
and by fall dries. By winter, it’s all boxed up
(unless the water-flow has frozen into shapes
around the concrete column persistent as wax),
a plywood top secure above the spigot like a coffin-lid.

A water-fountain is another node, an oasis
around which grows: this outhouse, potted plants,
state road map, forked stripes for parking cars,
pine groves shading picnic benches, distance.
A node’s an accident on a surface that attracts.

I am still in my center, red star on a public map.
Another line can trace a point of departure,
a destination there. But hardly anyone is here
to appreciate from whence we came or went.
Half the time the restrooms here are closed.

And there’s never an attendant to be seen
although his radio blares--a very tiny radio
with a very very big speaker. The air-vents
in the rest-room broadcast music to the stalls.
And also there’s graffiti in the toilet stalls.

Did someone make the telephone numbers up?
Are the exchange codes faked, or authentic?
What is at the other end of this number?
The rest-stop’s in the middle of the state,
but there are no easy answers on the map

or on the panels of the stalls--lesson being
don’t read in maps what you can’t get from them
or never find a meaning that cannot be there
or do not read into these layers of topography
defaced with loops gouged in Plexiglas with keys

as if their maker could include the state with them
or in the stall, the message: for good times, call:
what friends of friends know friends who call this way?
How small the line between me and my object.
I am always in the center of the state, my center.

Were I nowhere, I would be a cloudy substance
without a center, without a fixture in space.
The map will be lit every night, a wad of gum
stuck to its buffed-up front of Plexiglas.

Anyone could be beneath the wad of gum --
an addressee for a number in the stalls
or friends of friends, real breathing acquaintances.

The fountain anyway is frozen overflow
like the first volcano, first geyser on tundra
or on empty steppe, first thing on flat earth
declaring corners, here or there, direction.