Driving To Florida Poem by Robert Dawson

Driving to Florida

One of those mornings when even a piss was cold
glazing yellow the outhouse hole,
milk tongue in my mouth and on the jug, red raw
pork shanks stacked in the porch stiff as oiled
walnut table legs, and Mercury gearbox oil
too stiff to start, we took out for Florida.

My father had abandoned us in California.
Packing washer and bike to be repossessed by Sears
mother gave his shotgun away.
Four days on empty trains restored us to grandma.
A negro with stacks of pillows haunted the cars.
Below the shivering flushless toilet, ties and snow blurred gray.

Christmas, father phoned to bawl us out for moving.
Grandma told us to pray
that grandpa would drive us to Florida. Grant
and Alice, mother's aunt, chipped in for sun,
then greatgrandma decided to go, I think to play
Hell with my father's ear, as when he'd tried to christen me Juan.

Shoehorned in Grant's back seat,
we gabbled my grandma's girlhood. Betty was six.
She tagged the rearview mirror ledge and ducked
in grandma's Merc, which quavered like a bat
ahead of us. Mother would not look back,
her new home Toni tight as a haystack.

Their mudflaps slushing our glass, we threaded the sticks
while Alice worried each new state map to bits
dodging the red road routes through Illinois.
Too modest to ask for the filling station key,
she posted me at the men's room door.
I built a dwarf snowman in Tennessee.

Jackpines had spigots in the Georgia town
Grant's clutchplate skipped in. I tucked in
my cracker motel comforter to the chin
and dreamed I was my father steering south
and dreamed again our milk train chattering north.
Our breakfast waitress said a tiger'd broken

from a circus one town south. I saw
its sudden wealth of pelt
rustle blue Spanish moss on a tulip tree and pounce
against my screen like a three inch yellow moth.
Doors locked, that day we crossed a scraggly belt
of green palmetto hedging Florida.