There's poetry in walking out. Or so Philip Larkin suggested in Poetry of Departures: "He walked out on the whole crowd/ Leaves me flushed and stirred, Like Then she undid her dress/ or Take that you bastard." Larkin's title translates the phrase poésie des départs, a 19th-century French genre in which the artist contemplates a romantic "elsewhere". Larkin characteristically undercut the idea of liberation by having the road lead to yet another version of home: "Books; china; a life/ Reprehensively perfect." This week's poem-of-departure leaves things a little more open.
Anne-Marie Fyfe's Interstate is from her latest collection, Understudies: New and Selected Poems (Seren, 2010) and was first published in Late Crossing (1999). Set variously in London, the US and her native Northern Ireland, Fyfe's poems have a certain ease and elasticity, even when their structure is regular, as here. The tone is cool, the language plain and unclassifiable. It's as if travel between places had made it natural to combine associated poetic styles – lyric compression with a certain freedom of line and movement.
Interstate has, of course, an American setting. It might remind you of Elizabeth Bishop's Filling Station (in fact, there's another poem in the collection which is a homage to Bishop, and called The Filling Station) or, more bleakly, a painting by Edward Hopper.
The title sets out both the metaphorical and literal position of the absconding woman. It begins by showing us a minor pile-up: the remains of the picked-at meal that fills "the table's distance between" the couple in question. It's a clever way into the story, conveying the lack of appetite that may also be sexual and suggesting that, for the woman, a lot of ordinary things have gradually become too much. From the moment she "scoops the car keys", she seems swift and determined, but the poem registers the presence of vague impediments: the afternoon is "sticky", the forecourt "nauseous with diesel and ocean".
The poem moves fluently with rhythms that suggest the momentum of the road, while the narrative continually veers inward, like the car shifting lanes. The woman is unable to evade the guilt and anxiety of her escape: she can't help imagining what her husband might be feeling. The penultimate stanza is the most painful one: the farther away she gets, the more she remembers the person she has rejected.
Does the poignancy of the husband's dream of the boat deflect our sympathy from the escaping woman? The poem doesn't go in for special pleading. But, even as we sense that one of the characters in the story is facing what appears to be a tragedy, I think most readers must also feel swept up in the adventure. In Larkin's words, we're "flushed and stirred" by the drastic but seemingly necessary gesture.
There is no closure. The woman drives her own story onwards, to an unknown conclusion. The very act of moving forward induces a new mood of calm. Sundown has drawn a welcome line under the day, and the night and "the unbroken stretches of highway" signify a more romantic sense of possibility, although, depending on how you interpret the last line, the optimism is cautious: "It's clear ahead as far as her eyes can see."
Interstate
Half-eaten fries, the remains of hash browns,
fill the table's distance between them.
She scoops the car-keys, says she'll not be long.
In the washroom mirror she checks her face
close up; sees years of wearied waiting.
She steps into a sticky afternoon.
How long before he'll notice, before he'll ask –
the forecourt is nauseous with diesel and ocean –
ask if anyone's seen a woman in middle years.
She's onto the freeway, jittering across lanes.
And why, he'll wonder, now that the kids are gone,
now that they're free to hit the road each spring.
She overtakes on automatic, clearing Carolina –
recalls the one dream he has left, of building a boat;
upriver in summer; dry dock in winter. The two of them.
An unforeseen calm settles with sundown: she longs
for nightfall on unbroken stretches of highway.
It's clear ahead as far as her eyes can see.