I went back and worked on that missing line in the second stanza:
A trip, vacation time, a deep design
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.
Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear,
a proclamation unexpected here.
It’s almost past me, gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.
What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing?
I like the ironic resonance in the added line very much; “Proclamations” have come a long way.
Makes me want to wax Whitmanesque:
I hear the green field make its proclamation.
A pecan tree, too, makes its proclamation.
I hear them all.
Changing times change our tests. I thought to myself “I can hear Garrison Keillor reading this…” A poem, a good one.
later in the day:
Remembering Marc’s analysis of my rhyme scheme, mistaken in one detail as it happens, I went back and changed desire to design in the first line. Rhymes more nearly with flying, and actually is more of what I call a “tickler”: it’s a word you don’t expect but which your literate brain immediately is amused with how apropos it is.
Yeah, wondered about that.
Deep design
Car is flyin’
If I’m lyin’
I’m dyin’
I’m also sighn’
And sick of tryin’…