Missouri, I hardly knew you, your clapboard white churches, or your endless county roads. Dreams of Robert Adams photographing in neighbouring Colorado. Dry dust lungs parched for another beer by the cornfield, in the back of a truck, at the end of a long day's work, out behind the Casey's at noon, back by six for a grease box pizza to end the day. None of your ways known or discovered, mindless rambling without wheels, the straggler on the road, odd looks from locals speeding by watching me stoically ponder their star trails at high noon.
Missouri, I hardly knew you or your trees, grasses, and seeds. The fruits of your earth, the tables you feed, your faiths and politics, your misunderstandings misunderstood and mistook, are signs of a divided nation but a united people within you. I spoke with so few of you but counted all your dogs, each one that chased me down the road, nipping at my heels and howling wildly like dirt bikes and diesel engines mixed in with the low growl of industry in your fields.
Missouri, I hardly knew your seasons but tasted your summer's sting and autumn's country backing. On my last day, you left me with a taste of snow, a reminder of home, where I came from, and where you sent me back to. I rode a train miles across Illinois and Indiana, through Ohio and Pennsylvania, and finally up through New York back to Quebec and my homeland, your neighbour. There and back, two days on Amtrak and Greyhound, listening to the rattling tracks and rubber hum, writing down the stories of America, its people, the poets and my ears their empty pages.
Missouri, I hardly knew you, and I never got to call you home, for home is someplace I have yet to find outside of the woman you birthed, the one I married, the one who brought me to you, for this woman is full of the memories of your sunny days and cloudy skies, clouds the like world has never seen, clouds that bring storms on swift winds to cool the air and sun to dry the grass before supper.
Oh, Missouri, what lightning lives in her heart. Green and blue, with endless thunder and rain beating on the tin roof, lights off, curtains open wide to the greatest show on earth, the most remarkable woman in God's country with the soul of a rainbow-wrapped tornado.
Missouri, Missouri, Missouri; how the arch shone twice as bright the second passing through St. Louis headed east over those rusty towering bridges above the Mississippi barges below. I could see Busch stadium and the roar and the crack of the field, the hot dogs, the streets, and maybe it was dangerous, but I was looking so alive that I dared abandon my train for home to stay with you and to know you. To drink more than five months in a sleepy little town, to walk more than fifty miles along the Katy trail, to feast more than once on Kansas City barbeque on the Kansas side of the border, to not hold it against you, to let you be as you were before I arrived with my preconceptions and Canada's bitter cold cheer in my heart.
Yes, dear Missouri, I hardly know you still, and even my pictures seem to lie, for I know you through a woman, and we know you through the sky, the one universal love I could find to fit this corny poem, to wrap it up and somehow make it rhyme.
