Riffs
Frostburg
2014
I drove up through the mountains to Frostburg from Baltimore in a rental car, passing Civil War battlefields and steam train tourist railroads closed in the winter. I stayed in what was meant to look like a Swiss chalet motel, “A” frame roofs and cedar shakes. I talked with a writing class and gave a reading in an old opera house movie theater downtown. At a nearby café, I met Stephen Dunn who had recently retired from teaching and moved here. I told him I had used his book, Riffs and Reciprocities, in a prose poetry class I taught. We sat across the table from one another and reflected on what it felt like to be retired now, how Sundays felt all different, how you never retire from writing, how it is a good thing to talk in cafes with new people you’ve just met, also retired, and have poetic “organ recitals” as one declines on the top of a mountain. I left Frostburg and drove the switchbacks down to sea-level, crossing the bridge at Harper’s Ferry not knowing then I was a half-dozen years away from quitting myself.