Sometimes, driving to my hometown, passing
a pine tree standing alone in a cow pasture
or a farmhouse awash in blue northern sky,
I think of our old rock band — Doug, Randy,
and Ben — and how we hauled guitars, drums,
and a rented PA all over Chippewa County.

Of course we never became stars. Not one,
in fact, went on to make a living from music,
not Doug whose father was the band director
at our high school, nor Ben, the most musically
gifted, who gave up his teaching plans
and became — and died — a chiropractor.

In those times, the best rose to the struggle
for peace and equality, but it was
our own freedom we fought for night after 
night on sticky dance hall bandstands,
tracking a future to which the Sixties
songs we played seemed a coded treasure map.

Still there was some beautiful truth in
the selves we glimpsed and tried, with the help
of our heroes, to become and perhaps briefly
did. The single pasture pine and silence-
enveloped farmhouse are what our lives
might have been if we hadn’t struck a sound

we could claim for our own. If you’d asked, we’d
have said we were in it for the glory
and girls, though that action belonged more to
the dance floor than the stage. After we packed
up our gear, there was no one there for us
but ourselves on the dark two-lanes home.

Well, maybe a little glory, Hadn’t we
enjoyed the undeniable pleasure
of being accepted as plausible substitutes
for our idols, occasionally even admired?
It took me decades to understand
that the true prize was our time together

in the passionate pursuit of a dream.