.42) 2nd Wife, A Fragment Poem by Max Reif

I met my 2nd wife
at a Howard Johnsons
outside Daytona Beach.

Gave up trying
to hitch a ride north on I-95
in the caravan of moving jewels

and cut across the clover leaf
toward the neon sign for dinner
and to see if mom
could wire some money for a bus.

A thin, young blonde
was sitting at the counter,
talking to herself.

Maybe she just needs
someone to talk to, I thought,
and an hour or two later
I'd paid for her dinner,
found out a little about her,
how she'd taken a plane
south from Jersey'
just the day before
after asking God for a better life
(maybe I was that better life) .

We took a cab downtown
and found a motel,
Daytona Beach in the off-season,
all ferris wheels and snack shops.

Next morning, waking up,
she said she could hear
the sound of the ocean
for the first time, meaning
something besides
her own, loud thoughts.

A day later we caught
the greyhound north to Myrtle Beach.
She joined me in my motel room home.
That was January — wasn't till June
that we got married,
and soon after that
headed west in the car again

to Boulder, for the 'On The Road'
conference at the U. of Colorado,
celebrating 25 years since
Kerouac's book had come out.

She could be fun,
had an adventurous spirit,
though once in awhile
when we walked
near the tall hotels downtown,
she'd get all paranoid,
start talking crazy about the Mafia.

In the Spring
we got evicted
from the nice place
we'd moved to by the ocean,
partly so the landlady
could triple the rent
for the tourist season,

partly because every so often
our arguments raised a ruckus.

We found a 6-room
farm house for $110 a month
across the state line in North Carolina
and inland a few miles,
near Tabor City,
'Yam Capital of the World'.

The house was on an acre
of land along a tobacco road
sprinkled with pine forest,
and I learned how lovely the pink
tobacco flowers are in the spring.

Outside my study window
lay a green meadow, where
that same spring, white birds
would land, and I'd almost faint
from the beauty of it all.

One evening the car broke down in Myrtle Beach
and we force-marched something like 14 miles
along the winding, wooded back road,
I don't know how we did it.

Another time we were broke
and I went looking for old
coke bottles in the ditch
along the roadsides,
and found enough to tide us over —
fond and selective memories.

After the conference in Boulder,
we drove down to Denver
to visit my friend Ed,
then up to Cheyenne, Wyoming
with its gold-domed statehouse
for a week in a cheap hotel,
where I wrote my first book of poetry.

After an argument, though,
she took the car east
and left me stranded,
and I didn't know a soul.

I felt free, freed,
thumbed back down to Denver
in back of a pick-up truck.
It was 1982, and daydreaming
in the back of the truck
as the fields and meadows
went by in the sun,
I found a thought
snaking through my head:
'This ride is the end of the '60s.'

In Denver, more adventures,
staying with Ed
while I did a minstrel gig
on the new downtown mall.

A couple months later,
my estranged wife wrote
she was coming into town
on such-and-such a bus.
Ed and I went to the station,
saw her from a distance.
I think she was talking to herself again.

She looked a little crazy,
and we left the station
without even saying hi.