Fantasy

Fantasy

The fall it was on the radio, I was a boy
In the back of the bus, my brother
A few seats ahead of me because
It wasn’t cool to sit together.
Farther up, Mike and Suzy Bechdoldt,
Who lived in the double-wide tucked beside
The three hundred acre farm we called ours.
Farther up yet, the driver, a man named Jim —
Or was it Bob, Mike, Joe? — drove. 
We’d gotten him, whoever he was, to play
The radio for us, 97 ZOK out of Rockford,
I hope you read that as zee oh kay.
And probably because whatever
He didn’t hear he didn’t have to respond to,
He obliged, which is how I heard “Fantasy.” 
We didn’t have phones or MTV.
I know you read that as em tee vee.
My dad didn’t listen to Mariah Carey
In the dairy parlor (though the cows —
Such divas — would have loved her).
I heard it through the dozen or so 
Windows open to the fall air, which is why
I associate the song with the smell 
Of smoke and leaves and that
Unnamable odor of dogs who, gone
Missing for two days, come home.
We heard it so many times I began to
Observe the others’ reaction to it — 
My brother unapologetically bobbing his head,
Mike sitting stock still as if to better hear her,
Suzy grinning at me over the disemboweled seat backs,
As if the song were arousing some nascent lust in her,
When really she must have been no older than nine,
And her teeth were already the brown of apple bites,
And she wore the same clothes every day,
And around her neck thin wires of grime.
How Jim — or Bob, or Mike, or Joe — experienced it
I couldn’t say then nor can I now. “Experienced”
Is the right word, I think. If listening 
To Mariah Carey sing a song called “Fantasy” while barreling
Through the fields of northwestern Illinois in
Fall isn’t an experience I don’t know what is.
I like to think he liked it, whoever he was, 
And that he even began being able to think
The words as she sung them, 
Then mouth them, 
Then, one particularly beautiful
Afternoon, softly crooning them,
Certain none of the kids behind him could
Hear him over the roar of the wind
Through the windows and the groan of the engine,
Not knowing that poems hear everything.