RETURN TO OLD CHEVY FIELD

At the ends of America
A field of aging Bel Aires and Impalas
Settles into the Patagonian dirt at the end of the Americas
Like Midwestern potentates in shabby suits.
An open-air mausoleum visited by rust and weeds
So far away from Michigan, Detroit seems
A mythical town of perfect steel and vinyl,
An El Dorado of six-pack carbs and chrome-plated pipes.
I rode past in silence, just another passenger
Choosing the window over the aisle of the past
I marveled at those decades of Big Steel
Buried so far from drag races and spilled beer.
But to go back there, to open the heavy doors
And slide across the sun-piqued plastic seats
And take the unmovable polymer into my hands,
To hear the white cotton laugh of a school girl
Floating over fields of browning corn
I felt I could drive over two continents in a single blink.
Waving with one arm crooked over the window,
Cruising the seam where the horizons of our worlds met
Somewhere over the silent pampas.

— James Norman Kerns
"Return To Old Chevy Field" was written in a bar in Rio Gallegos, Argentina