Detour
By Jane McKinley
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
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Not a detour, exactly, but a long, one-way stretch
through construction, too far for hand signals or shouting, so they gave my father an orange flag to hand off when he reached the end. At some point the lane disappeared, and to skirt the roadwork, my father drove our Impala sedan down a ditch to a field lying fallow. He never saw the flagman. My brother says our sister often told the story:
how Dad got out of the car, walked over to a cornfield nearby, and waved down a farmer whose tractor was nearing the end of a row, shouting: What God-forsaken place is this? I don’t know whether the farmer responded, but the road ended up in Gravity, Iowa, pop. 286. Is it gravity that pulls me back? Or my father’s
levity? Of the four in the car that day, only my brother is still alive. I remember their arrival, how I watched my younger siblings racing toward me, not realizing who they were until I spotted my dad—standing beside a dust-coated car, his whole face alight as he waved the orange flag like a trophy. |
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Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and founder and longtime artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of two poetry collections: Vanitas (Texas Tech UniversityPress, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has recently finished a series of poems based on the life of Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, three of which will appear in the spring issue of The Southern Review.
Website: janemckinley.com
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Author’s Note:
I never set out to write poetry. It just happened. A poem came to me while I was driving through the rain. The poem helped to dispel an image that had haunted me for decades: the silhouette of my eldest sister lying in a casket when I was twelve. This loss and others, including the death of my youngest sister from juvenile diabetes, inhabit the three poems here, as well as my first two collections.