How vivid the memory is of those trucks "grumping and rumbling" in the night.
I don't recall exactly when it was, but I remember being bedded down for the night in a motel at Terre Haute. Then I heard them. It sounded like a parade of trucks, although there weren't nearly that many ... and there wasn't exactly a steady stream of them.
I recall getting up to take a look. There was a single, huge dump truck grinding past on the highway. I don't recall which highway, but It seems to me that it was a north-south route.
I went back to bed.
The trucks kept rolling. It wasn't a loud noise, but it seemed persistent ... and it seemed that there was just enough of a grade in the road, right beside the motel, that their grumbling ... all of them ... increased right there as they shifted to a lower gear and went on climbing the hill.
I got back up ... jotted down my impressions ... and went back to bed. And really slept then. Oh, did I ever!
The poem, which later became part of my first published collection:
NIGHT ECHOES
Mud-laden trucks
grump and rumble
outside my room,
hauling mounded
loads of quiet
down the highway,
letting it spill
in the darkness,
come rolling back,
thunder’s echo
muffled, distant,
washing across
this emptiness
like surf crashing
on my pillow.
©
2003(originally published in Chance of Rain, Finishing Line Press, 2003)
***
Today's word:
crashingAfterthoughts ... in response to your comments:
Thank you, Helen, for that account of learning to adjust your sleep to the comings and goings ... the racket and shaking ... caused by those trucks in the frozen world of Massachusetts. That reminded me of growing up near the Illinois Central tracks in Southern Illinois ... at a time when there were scads of passenger trains, freight trains and troop trains running, day and night ... overnight visitors to our home would always comment on how many trains came through ... but we hadn't noticed ... just more night music to us, I suppose.
Whoa, Uncle Bill ... your mentioning a corn-stalk mattress, "the din of crickets" ... takes me a long way back ... all the way to memories of snuggling into a "featherbed mattress" on a cold winter night while the lights from a nearby heating stove danced on the ceiling. Thanks for stopping by.
2 comments:
Your wonderful thoughts put into poetry, always take me somewhere...this made me go back to when I'd moved from CA to Amherst, Mass. I moved there in August--important to the story--in other words...into the unfrozen world of Western Massachussettes summer. Things were wonderfully quiet on the sugar-maple lined street with woods on once side and across the road. Then came the frozen winter...ground and all, of course. When a truck hit an unseen small rise on that road, it would make a loud bang and the whole frozen ground would shake. In my sleep I thought it was just a small earthquake, having lived in CA, and I'd go right back to sleep, even though the frozen ground had shaken my very bones. This went on and on like your trucks in your poem, but when I knew what had happened, I could sleep through the next bump, and the next, and until the spring thaw and beyond...until the next winter, and then experienced again, the surprise racket and shaking, and roll over and sleep once more.
Every morning, I look forward to bring up your site and travel out of my daily routine. Oh, what wonderful transportation!
The photo on this one is a place where I'd like to go and rest a while.
Thank you, Helen
Robert,
I like this one. You have very effective metaphors working in your poem. It reminds me of my childhood: lying on a corn-stalk mattress in that old farmhouse, listening to the din of crickets, when that truck passed by, his headlights grabbing at the pictures on the wall, and then disappearing into the shroud of darkness beyond the next hill. Yeah. “Night Echoes” works for me.
Uncle Bill
http://journals.aol.com/fremoris/rosarium/
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