Rugby

Rugby, North Dakota is dead center,
smack dab in the middle of North America,
sitting quietly, little known,
with all the states writhing around it,
all the corn fields, the trailer parks,
the mountains, the ghettoes,
the dwindling forests, the endangered
species of the participating citizen,
the poets and beatniks and punks,
the bank robbers and pimps,
the ministers and governors and
their many misguided congregations,
the cities of trash and forgotten lives,
the ghost towns and war zones,
all stretching out, acre upon acre, from its
epicenter, cruising and riding,
lying and stealing for miles and miles and
miles. Occasionally, some tourists stop in
at the main bar at the center of town.
Danny, the bartender in residence
for decades, has a little speech he gives
every once in a while to passers through,
a speech about how being at the very
center of it all means Rugby is the actual
heart of America (and Canada too,
for that matter), how being the heart
means at any given moment you can
catch a whiff, on Rugby's streets,
of the essence of us all,
can finally really swallow what it's
always meant to be born and raised,
or to come to your fruition,
in a country of mongrels and dissidents,
of atheists and Bible thumpers,
of militia men and hippie girls,
of skeptics and shamans,
of black, of white, of brown,
of pain, of endless love, of boundless hope.
Very few actually know it, but even just
the idea of Rugby, North Dakota somehow
manages to keep America America,
when she forgets herself who she really is,
when she ignores the fact that she really does
still have a heart, a heart still beating
despite the bastardization of all her dreams,
still pounding in the face of all her shame.

(2006)