SCIENCE FAIR SCIENCE FAIR SCIENCE FAIR sums up the overarching mood of my home, but finally the day has come: science-fair angst has reached its peak, and tonight we caravan up to the great event, toting one worked-up ninth grader, one plywood hovercraft, and one little brother who is enthusiastically anticipating the take-out sandwich he will order for dinner from the House of Pizza.

Otherwise, I shuffle along per usual: still reading Coleridge, James, Shelley; still working on my fairy-tale poem; still revising my du Maurier essay; still washing clothes and sweeping the kitchen floor.

Here's a poem that reminds me of central Maine in March, though it mentions neither. It's from Subject Matter, a book of unrhymed fourteen-line poems that one might as well call sonnets. I believe this is the first poem of Baron's that I've published on this site. Mostly I'm careful about using contemporary work without asking first, but his book has been out since 2003, and I don't think he'll mind. Anyway he's in Italy. On vacation. Eating arugula sandwiches and inspecting Caravaggios. He's probably forgotten that Maine truckers even exist, let alone that he ever wrote a poem about them.

Trucking

Baron Wormser

"He's pretty good-humored when he's not surly,"

That's Peckerwood talking about J.D., though

It could be Moonwalk talking about Bear Man,

Or Dropkick on Tail Feather. Thousands of miles

Space a mind out until there are gaps that feel

Like whole time zones where you forget who's there

Back home or that there is a back home.

When you're sitting somewhere getting weighed

Or a waitress forgets it was a double cheeseburger,

Your head springs back like a rubber band

And you feel how damn tired the body is

That supports your drifting mind. And when you call

Home and she'd supposed to be there and she isn't,

Every crappy, twanging song becomes your own.