The Farm Wife Describes her Mystery Trips

Once or twice a year, I board a bus with strangers,
none of us knowing where we’ll be
until we get there.  It’s like floating in meringue
with no notion of what’s below.

I send everyone back home a postcard: 
the mouth of Mammoth Cave, dunes that rise
like pyramids or the zoo in Cincinnati.  
My sisters think it odd

I never plan for Italy or a Caribbean cruise. 
As girls, they studied maps, plotted their escape
from floors they could never scrub clean
and sheets that smelled faintly

of what bedded down in straw.  I travel
the way of starlings, clustered like a cloud
that cracks the whip and then lengthens into a river,
leaving and returning, never asking why.

—Shari Wagner is the author of  Evening Chore and editor of her father’s memoir, A Hundred Camels, both books published by Cascadia Publishing House. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and has been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. For more Farm Wife poems, see the January 2011 issue of Center for Mennonite Writing, http://www.mennonitewriting.org/