American Life in Poetry: ‘Traveling with Guitar’]’’0

Debra Marquart, who teaches at Iowa State, is a poet, a memoirist, a writer of stories and a singer with her own R & B group, The Bone People. She knows the musician’s life, and here’s a road poem from her most recent book from New Rivers Press, “Small Buried Things.”

Traveling with Guitar

For you can travel with a screaming red rolling bag

and float unnoticed on conveyors, through terminals

or you can lug half a moose rack from Maine

to Minnesota, carry it like a broken wing through airports

as my friend Gro did, and draw only the curious touches

of children waiting at gates. But dare to travel with a guitar

and invite confessions from strangers in pinstripe suits

of garage band summers, invite winks, gotcha smiles,

and devil’s horns rock on gestures. Invite finger points

and winks, the long tongue licks, and the rubberneck glance

to check if you are someone famous. To dare to travel

with a guitar is to mark yourself charismatic megafauna

of the airport terminal. Old friend, what else could I do

but carry you? I have stored you in closets, propped you

in corners, hunched over you late-nights, staring perplexed

at the mysteries of your neck. Body of my body, string

of my strings, see how the world began to hum and sing

that day at thirteen when I opened the big birthday box.

Poem copyright 2015 by Debra Marquart from “Small Buried Things” (New Rivers Press, 2015) and reprinted by permission of Debra Marquart and the publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.