Maria Rouphail

Iowa Scenes

 . . . to glorify things, just because they are.
‌                                 –Czeslaw Milosz

I.
Beginnings
(Iowa City)
This is Grant Wood country,
his painted idylls of lollipop trees
and ribbon-candy country roads.

A century on, no farmer
hulks behind a horse-drawn plow,
no housewife hangs hand-stitched
quilts on a backyard clothesline.

But wind-lashed hills and coffee-brown
fields ripple green every spring.
A blue tendril of river curls
around the University buildings,
bending southeast until it
surrenders to the Mississippi.

And the prairie flowers,
the wild bees—

I am a coastal woman from a big city.
I have a grandchild, Philly-born, just past infancy.
His parents will raise him here, in Iowa City, for a while.

From their back porch I look out,
past a border of honey locust and cedar
to a sky of fat-bellied clouds,
gravid with rain, ready to calve.

There are fates worse
than starting out in this place.
For now, it will be good.
As sure as season follows season,
it will be very good.

II.
Flyover Country
(Wilson’s Orchard)

One of earth’s great beauties—
a turquoise blue morning in early summer,
the eastern hills dozing in sun-lathered air.
A father and his little son bending
over rows of strawberry bushes.
Speaking softly, cooing with praise,
he shows the child how to separate
ripe fruits from their stems, how to pluck
the sweetest without crushing them.
One by one by one by one by one—
father and son lift the fragile globes into a basket.
For this is slow and deliberate work requiring a fine hand.
High overhead, a long-haul jet streaks northwest.
The boy looks up, tugs at his father’s jeans,
pointing to the jet’s feathery contrail,
twin-tailed like a tree swallow’s.
In that instant, from the very field where they stand,
a meadowlark flings itself into the wind.

III.
Goosetown
(what a grandchild will come to tell his own children
about the early years on Reno Street)

Come evening, we lined our winter boots
along the mud room wall, like tidy children ready for bed.
Coats and car keys hung from steel hooks.
Umbrellas by their straps. Hats and gloves
filled a wicker basket on the floor.

The mud room door opened to the side-yard and the concrete pad
where the black Volkswagen hunkered all night,
square and squat as a sleepy bull in the Iowa snow.
Saturday mornings, we’d climb in for the ride to
the ten o’clock Story Time at the children’s library.

Mama fussed over the belts and buckles until she was sure
I was safely harnessed on my padded throne.
Only then did Papa fire up the engine, and we three
rolled slowly down the driveway, braking at the sidewalk,
scanning this way and that for cars and kids on bikes.
Neighbors jogging past us toward the park
turned their heads and waved, Hi! when my father
pumped lightly on the horn with the heel of his hand.

Then we pushed into the street, made a quick cut left and right,
past a goose and her three goslings forged in steel and welded
to the top of a weather-flayed street sign, corner of Reno and Church.

How I loved that metal mama bird!
Every time I looked up at her and her brood in tow,
I wondered, Where are they going? Long necks urging forward,
one splayed foot flopped in front of the other— I liked to pretend
some important place was waiting for them to arrive.
Just like us.

(note: Goosetown is the name of a neighborhood in Iowa City, indicated by
its logo: the stamped metal geese affixed to all the street signs of that precinct)

Maria Rouphail is Poetry Editor of Main Street Rag literary magazine. Her third poetry collection, All the Way to China (2022), was a finalist in both the University of Wisconsin Brittingham Poetry and the Blue Light Press competitions. Her earlier collections are Apertures and Second Skin. She is the 2024 NCPS Distinguished Poet for central North Carolina. A six-time Pushcart nominee, she lives in Raleigh.