Motel

Motel Moderné

 “We set out to drive

around America”

—Ted Hughes, “Isis,”

Birthday Letters

We borrow Aurelia’s dumpy—

Old Chevy rattle trap

Hardly any luggage at all—

I want Ted to see America

The hole weird spooky—

Continent from shore to shore

The Continent of Death—

Stretching out for miles & miles

Not compact and squeezed—

Together like the British Isles

Smiling in a ratty café—

Sulking in a gas station bathroom

The whole crummy thing—

One vast Jurassic juke-joint

So different than Europe—

Black Isis deep in every well

Polymorphously perverse—

Lurking in the Pleistocene cliffs

Dinosaur evil karma vibes—

Skull Island on the move

Demonic prairie schooners—

Waving seas of golden wheat

Goddesses grotesque—

Tornados, scalps, dead Indians

Ted yearned for the moors—

He hated the tacky towns, motels

Kitschy black velvet portraits—

Elvis Presley leering from thin walls

Ted wasn’t just homesick—

It was the schmaltzy highway hell

The spectral truck stop zombies

The Dante hell of it all

No escape from the Badlands—

The homicidal prowling bears