Retrospective

Has anything like this ever happened to you?
You find yourself on a back country road
so beautiful to you that you ask yourself
how it could be in this world,
so impossibly lovely to you that you pull over
and tears come, as if all the griefs and sorrows
you ever felt were completing themselves, and the kingdom
you have been traveling toward all your life
were suddenly at hand, wondering what you will say
if the state trooper or the sheriff’s deputy
pulls in behind you, checking to see why your car
is in a place too narrow for a car, your head
in your hands, on a strip of muddy earth
between the road, the wet ditch and the mallow,
the unharvested rice fields spread out furiously green
on the table flatness, the could mountains climbing slowly
in the feathery hot sky, the lean egrets wading
with unbroken patience and attention
near the village of Sunset where some young girls
grow up thinking they need to be elsewhere,
see the true world, a stretch of winding road
with unphotographed houses and useful shes,
a few brown horses grazing, and two stray dogs
leaping in and out of the roadside weeds
with the excitement of fools,
a place nowhere, and suddenly home.