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US-24 is a highway with its tail in the Colorado Rockies and its nose in Southeastern Lower Michigan. Telegraph Road, Michigan’s section of US-24, runs from Monroe to someplace north of Pontiac. No one is sure where it ends; even the road signs are of no help. Signs at two different locations read “US-24 ENDS.” Running north-south, the stretch of road is an anomaly in the US road system, where even-numbered highways supposedly indicate an east-west course. Not a thoroughfare of romance like Woodward or Jefferson, it skirts the extreme northwestern edge of the territory marking the city of Detroit between Eight Mile Road and Florence Street, south of West McNichols. Indeed, Telegraph Road lies at the outskirts of most of the communities it encounters, never central to a town’s life, always peripheral.

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US-24 appears in the literature of the area as a symbolic exit out of, or begrudging entrance into,Detroit, whether the passage is physical or imaginative. True to the road’s history as one of the State’s first telegraph lines, US-24 often represents a connection to lands beyond the borders of Michigan or even the United States. Poet Philip Levine visits US-24 several times in his work.

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In a few poems, Levine shows the life of men working on a road construction crew on US-24, a road that “reached all the way/to the kingdom of Toledo and beyond” (“Naming,” Breath, 55). These are men “dignified/by dirt” (“Making It New,” New 164) getting nowhere on this patch of gravel, men who “aren’t/ever gonna make Monroe” (165), or anywhere else for that matter. These men, like many of Levine’s characters, are survivors, inheritors of the ironic joke of getting nowhere working on the highway. And in “Dawn, 1952,”Levine honors their existence:

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                                                                                                I can

                                   remember the little fire of paper and scraps

                                   in a bleached-out oil drum in the snow

   on the shoulder of US 24 where w

   stamped our feet and took the day’s

   first drink even before the day had

   come leaking one flaring match at

   a time. Suddenly the shapes of men,

   parked cars, the long road stretching

   to another state south of us.... ( 7 Years 56)

 

These are men of little consequence and, Levine reminds us, of great importance.

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In “I Could Believe” we meet another figure of little consequence, an American veteran of the Spanish

Civil War, the speaker of the poem. The speaker owns a brace of portrait studios in World War II-era

Detroit and makes a decent living. However, he is haunted by guilt and the memory of seven men who

traded their lives for his; to him, at least, men of great importance. Sometimes, the burden of undeserved

success, an undeserved life, becomes too much. In the speaker’s voice Levine writes of driving beyond

the lights of small plants that produce tank and half-track bearings, parking his car, and smoking

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                        in silence on the shoulder

                        of US 24, 7,000 miles

                        from my lost Spain,

                        a lifetime from the Ebro

                        where 7 men I came to need

                        went under in a small boat

                        and I crossed alone…. (New 176)

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Here US 24 telegraphs the speaker to another place, far beyond Detroit or even beyond Spain. It transports him, and the reader, to an emotional realm where “except / for the dying I could/believe” (177).

 

In Levine’s work US-24 allows us access into the worlds of men who cannot escape Detroit or cannot escape events in lands 7,000 miles away. Somehow, we no longer seem to be traveling along the periphery.

 

 

Postscript: “Telegraph Road,” a song written by Mark Knopfler and performed by Dire Straits, can be heard on the 1982 album Love over Gold. –ed.

 

 

Michael Martin, Ph.D. is a philosopher, theologian, poet, musician, songwriter, editor, and farmer. He is the author of Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014), Meditations in Times of Wonder (a book of poems) (Angelico 2015), The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Angelico, 2016), The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry & Philosophy (Angelico, 2017), and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagining of Everything (Angelico 2018). He is the editor of The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Sources, Poetry, and Critical Essays on Sophiology (Angelico 2016) and of the journal Jesus the Imagination. He is also director of The Center for Sophiological Studies. Dr. Martin taught English and Philosophy at Marygrove College prior to its closing.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Knopfler, Mark. “Telegraph Road.” Dire Straits, perf. Love over Gold. Universal Music Publishing Group, 1982,  

https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/dire-straits/telegraph-road.

Levine, Philip. 7 Years from Somewhere. Atheneum, 1979.

---. Breath. Knopf, 2004.

---. New Selected Poems. Knopf, 2002.

 

 

Photos by Frank Rashid

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First posted in 2006, updated in September 2019