Our fall/winter 2018 contest judge Kelli Agodon felt that two poems tied for 2nd place. We posted one last week, ?Grave Site Visit? by Nancy Levinson, and this week we are posting the second second-place winning poem, Barbara Simmons “Driving Home.”

Kelli wrote this about her choice of Barbara?s poem:

“Driving Home” is a lovely meditation on family car rides of youth and what we take with us. With lines such as “trying to unpeel our legs,? and ?trying to figure grace into our leaving,” I was transported into the hot sticky backseat of the family car. The beauty in this poem comes in the transition of how the speaker moves from rider to driver, and the memories she brought with her on this journey.

I think you will agree after reading Barbara’s poem:

Driving Home
by Barbara Simmons

the niece as navigator, uncle driving in the front seat,
aunt, mother, brother, all of you, in the back,
our Sunday driving to New Hampshire drove
us to the border of uncertainty.
The maps? own folds could hide our destination,
the dot removed that should have been our city.
I learned that reading maps was easier than reading feelings, sensing
tensions creased between my aunt and uncle, mother and aunt.

Later, another drive, this time with you,
searching for Four Corners, finding that medallion seal,
thinking as we stepped on every quadrant
I was truly nowhere in your life
and maybe both of us had not found a place in mine.

We were sitting, you and I,
on plastic covered seats
the muggy summer days
stuck in one position,
trying to unpeel our legs,
trying to figure grace into our leaving.

Those were the car stories I?d remember
but it took years for me to understand
the endless Sunday drives with family,
trying to be family,
and then the trips with you,
trying to belong,
and finally driving with myself,
finding it all right to be
in the driver?s seat, finally driving home.

I admire the way this poem handles time. First, we are in the car the poet’s niece is driving. From the back seat, we meet the family and learn the young poet felt that reading a map, even with folds and the dot of her own city missing, was easier than figuring out the tension she felt. Then she shifts to her adulthood artfully with the word “Later.” We are there with her on a car trip to Four Corners with a lover. The word “quadrant” is so useful here because we see the land and the map. That they are on sticky plastic covered seats trying to be graceful when their legs are stuck is emotionally metaphorical.

How deftly the poet puts us in that uncomfortable situation (leaving a relationship almost always, it seems, lacks grace). Then, how easily the poet moves us to now with these words: “Those were.”? We are in the poet’s present, the poet who is making the connection between an adult love relationship that didn’t have room for her and a family that didn’t seem to really have room for one another though they were crammed into a car.

She is at home in herself now, where she isn’t sitting in someone else’s idea of relationship or their failing at it.

When I asked Barbara to tell us something about the roots of her poem, she emailed:

The poem came about when, in a Writing It Real online poetry workshop, one prompt asked us to think about an autobiographical moment that we could revisit — I can’t remember the exact prompt, but I do remember thinking about traveling and the many roads I’ve traveled with family, with ?significant others?, and, of course, Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled” reminder to think about byways….The Sunday drives where I became the navigator led me to think about times I’d given up my use of a personal compass — which had led to roads leading away from me.? Other trips came to mind (one to the spot called “Four Corners” where four states do, indeed, touch) — and the metaphor seemed to rise up readily about ‘driving home’ —learning to get to the heart of what I meant to myself, and not simply what I was hoping to mean to others.

I think I’ve spent the last six decades learning more about the intersections of observing and living, and my writer’s ‘being’ has helped me attempt ways to comment on the precarious balance between viewing and living …and learning from both.

Please leave Barbara a comment below. It is a treat to have the two poems posted during National Poetry Month.