by M. Blake

                
At the field’s edge, under the full moon, he made his simple bed, the poet. Unable to sleep, he didn’t care, knowing he had found the right spot for the night; he felt at ease here. Him and the deer.

He had spooked a couple earlier, the small white tails bounding away (surprising him, how fast the big things could move). Big enough to flatten brush in their haste. He had heard them again later on the other side of the field.

Nothing but cut cornstalks in that field now, like stubble on a carelessly shaved chin. He remembered the full moon over cornfields where he grew up, at different times of the year. Sometimes it was just these small dead stalks that could trip you up; at other times the green and thriving corn would be over his head and he could disappear into the rows. Cow corn, it was called.

The poet thought of poems and Walt Whitman on this night at the field’s edge, not even a mile from the highway. This was his campsite for the night because he wouldn’t hitchhike when it was dark. He had been ready for a rest anyway, and he had water, vodka and snacks in his bag. It was a mild night out for the fall and he knew there wouldn’t be many more like it around here. It was the reason he was heading south.

Within sight, from his shadowed spot behind some trees, he could see the big, expensive looking hotel with its red, yellow, white, green and blue lights. It was a well-lit, block-like and imposing structure looming over the tops of the trees. These trees were no doubt on separate property, which is why they hadn’t been cleared away for the mammoth piece of architecture. The poet-camper appreciated having the trees between him and the hotel; it gave him some cover so that he didn’t have to concern himself with hotel security. From where he rested, he could see the headlights on vehicles entering and leaving the big parking lot. He had seen some of the large, new, luxury cars earlier when crossing the lot. Well-off travelers carrying plastic for expenses, wearing suits, carrying suitcases and travel bags (not the beat-up kind he carried), newspapers and current magazines, and, of course, the ubiquitous cell phones. They were busy people, with business that took them out on the road so that they ended up spending nights in places like this. The poet-camper had once spent a night in a similarly expensive hotel, in another state, compliments of a driver who had picked him up hitchhiking. The man was a pot grower from Georgia, on his way from a “flower show” in California back to his home outside Atlanta. The pot grower had conducted some successful business dealings on the west coast, and was now flush with money, some of which he felt like spending. He treated his passenger to an expensive dinner in the hotel restaurant, and then a night in a big double bed of his own. It was what the hotel called a suite, the hitchhiker thought. Whatever they called it, what he remembered most about the night, besides the big meal and the numerous booze drinks he sucked down, was the large white bathroom and the long shower he took, washing off two weeks worth of sweat and dirt.

“Go on in there, you need it more than I do,” the driver had said, with a laugh. “And throw those socks out. I got a clean pair you can wear.”

Yes, he had been stinking at the time, just out of Mexico, and a few days of hitchhiking down there just to get to the border. One of his first hitchhiking journeys, in his early twenties.

Now, he had just set out on another one, twenty years later, still traveling light and sleeping wherever his last ride of the day had left him. Still writing poems, eating granola, crackers and dried fruit, sipping vodka and, in this instance, still thinking that there was something magical on a full moon night, especially near a cornfield in New England, with some woods and wild animals around. On this night he even had the colorful lights of a hotel a short distance away. The contrast of nature and “progress” -- wild animals in their element, and people in theirs. And the poet-camper feeling he was halfway between those two worlds, yet knowing he would be comfortable with that position for the next few hours, thinking of Walt Whitman and other poets, and how he might have a poem about this well-illuminated night. 

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