BROWN EYED GIRL, 1967

With our opening credits soundtrack,
“Brown-Eyed Girl,” cranking from the radio...
three carloads of us rolling into St. George
under a Canadian sunset promising to swallow us whole
in a big neon night of “big Molson!”
and  getting to practice our 3rd-year leçons Française:
“Ou… est… la salle …de bains?”
and the leering bartender taunting,
“You are saying what,eh?
— You wish to take a bath?”

And Jack hauling his sudden “difference of opinion”
with the “goddamn frog” who'd
dançez’d  betty while we were in “la salle”
out onto the veranda, and me
now the drunken peacemaker:
“Jackie Jackie Jackie! We are in a foreign
country, for crying out loud!”

And the night never disappointing us
drinking our way into someone’s lavish
governor’s-mansion wedding reception,
each of us reveling by then in his very own
Sun Also Rises’ Pamplona
sashaying right into the reception line
doling out hugs and handshakes:
instant siblings of the bride...

And in the end, stranding only one ugly American
who wandered away and failed to return
by the Cinderella hour—
leaving him way up there
in that foreign country for crying out loud…

Today, when Van Morrison riffs it up into
“Hey where did we go
days when the rains came…”
I’m back behind that wheel in a heartbeat
rolling downhill into the adrenalin rush
of St. George!