Cleo Griffith
I Found a Motel on the Internet and…
after missing the dirt-road entrance once,
calling for directions, we found the “office,”
hand-lettered sign pasted on a battered screen-door
which looked like the original–from the ’40s.
Inside, a blond young man with no expression,
long bare arms at his sides, no shirt under overalls,
just long arms hanging bare,
interrupted from something, stood
surrounded by clutter of glassware, rocks,
tools, mounds of unrelated objects,
in one corner a large telescope.
My husband asked him if he was
interested in astronomy; he said someone left it with him.
The telescope needed cleaning because the lens got dirty.
He picked up a key from amidst a scatter of stuff
on a small table, pronounced we were in Cabin 5,
and took us there, two buildings down.
We would not see another person
over our stay, nor see him again
until we checked out–having survived
a cabin of helter-skelter construction
with the virtue of a great bed.
The same overalls, shirtless,
he promised a receipt by e-mail, surprising us–
that modern connection.