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Burma Shave: Those highway signposts were my first experience of minimalism and "poetry" (of course I didn't know this at the time), projected into a landscape over time and distance. On our summer vacations to National Parks west of the Rockies, my brother and I learned to scan the roadside for the small red rectangle that contained a posted message.
Eventually, an easy and odd phrase would appear in the foreground of vast, open space—my only recollections are of the signs posted in sparsely treed or un-built areas where the horizon or mountains were stationary while the nearness blurred past. And in that nearness these teases of phrase, which all homed in on Burma Shave. Wide space passing outside the windhsield, and a focus on finding the momentary figure in it. An odd, anticipatory kind of concentration.
My father flew planes over Burma in WW2, and I grew up with stories from a vaguely magical sounding place he had lived in a life that was only a few years before I was born. He edited the war horror from his stories—Thank god I flew cargo planes not bombers, he told us—and the pictures and events he recalled seemed a century in the past.
Burma Shave was also a kind of non-sequitur—in front the name of a strange country that was khaki, and had a familiar smell to it, evoking my father's closeted uniforms, old tobacco from his smoking days, and spices and something musty, tropical, dangerously enchanting; all preceding what I watched him do to his face with foamy scented soap and a razor in the morning.
Burma Shave | 
