James Haug’s most recent book, Walking Liberty, won the Morse Poetry Prize and was published in 1999 by Northeastern University Press. Down the Road I Go, the Song Went After leaving my doppelganger stranded atop his favorite stool in a spoon outside St. Johnsbury, I’d flagged a ride from a fastback Barracuda and rode in the hatch. At the wheel sat Neil Young as a young man, tunelessly chewing a matchstick, lugging a ton-and-a-half of ancient Detroit. A woman beside him twice his age deadpanned wisecracks that made him turn from the road to behold her full-faced, displaying his teeth in a broad rictus of laughter. And where are you going? he cackled over the radio, as if all those songs had never been written or that we ever sang them to ourselves as we set forth each new day. Down the road I go, the song played on, coming to the bridge. But this song has no bridge, yelled the driver, there’s just this long part after the second chorus where we all get lost. In a dark neighborhood of Babylon a porchlight was on–I’d seen it trembling from across the water– and a woman I’ve never met drying her hands at the kitchen sink. James, she sang, clear as day, albeit a day wild with approaching fronts, everything looks different. Due West It’s not like it was all bad, the place she lived. Still if she could endure she thought the knotted road thousands rode everyday she might wind-up somewhere else. Halfway there stands an American Elm on the plain, cooling fevered travelers who’d not lost their way, since all they knew was direction. The landscape inscribed distance in their looks. Because there was a here and a here after that she was willing to range.