Bus in the Woods
by DL Pravda
Not far from where Guitar Mark and I got chased by shotguns for accidental trespassing, I find a lost house with a yard of old cars. I pull over, pass granite gravestones by the ditch. First thing I seek: a vehicle new enough to run, an updated license plate, smoke from the cinderblock chimney, anything to show presence. Nothing. The mad March wind bites. Among ivied pines and hollow sycamores and one monster magnolia, I photo a dusky blue Jeep J-4000 without wheels or tailgate. An Olds Cutlass covered in honeysuckle and leaves. An Eagle 370 bowrider, its hull underground, surrounded by a jail of young trees. A yellow Volkswagen Rabbit, engine torn out. Way deep back, I find a bus, dark green, tan stripe, white roof. I circle and shoot her hippie curves and rusted mag wheels. Its door half-open, I consider a corpse inside. Can’t resist. I climb the stairs into a former life. Now piled with clutter somehow like a stagnant pond. Floor of cardboard boxes and bags and brown newspapers. Faded blue metal barrels. A washer. A sunroof with vines growing down. Two toms and a bass, dusty glitter-gold, from a drumset. A guitar with its fretboard separated. Old frames. And a tall, ornate trophy with a reaching angel on top. I see a wreck but flashback to a once-happy scene. Maybe nomads or a traveling band. I sense a rolling party from the days we still dream about: the live-and-let-live freedom of not too long ago, the kind you had to grab, to dare, to leap into the belief the cops will leave you alone unless some crazy shit went down. I stop shooting, lost in my head. Mark’s passed on. The band’s broken up. Deep breath, I return to today. Camera clicks, I keep chasing inspiration down riffs and roads. Maybe when I get home, I’ll write a song about this land and this bus and vans and trucks that carry us on to dawn and coffee and eggs and biscuits and fruit not quite ripe.
Author of the award-winning book Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields, DL Pravda appeared on the Library of Congress podcast ‘The Poet and the Poem’ with Maryland laureate Grace Cavalieri in 2023. Recent poems appear in Sand Hills Literary Review, KAKALAK, Roanoke Review and Mid-Atlantic Review, and Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.