The Demise of the Lincoln Highway
(or The Vanishing Face of America)
They left the scalloped,
red metal lawn chairs
rusting there on the porch
running the length
of the Used-to-Be Motel,
long since abandoned
and battered as Bogart's face,
with the memory of dusty, yellowed suitcases
covered with straw-looking paper that,
as a girl, grandmother would take
on her first, "grown-up" vacation to Niagara Falls
in her parents' Ford station wagon,
with lunch in a diner built like a Coffee Pot and later
a view of "three states and seven counties"
on the deck of a hotel built as an ocean liner
riding the green waves of Pennsylvania's Alleghenies,
then a stop for the night in one of those
new-fangled motor hotels,
the personality and character of such places
now replaced by the numbing sameness
of faceless conglomerate chains,
much like American citizens themselves
have been malled and advertised
into the oblivion
of shopping endlessly through life
via the myriad and meaningless choices
comprising America's vast
and narcotic commercial wasteland.
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