Road Trip

In the humid honeycomb of night,
trucks loaded down with carnage
stutter at the pumps. Neon tubes
sell cigarettes, the news, an umpteenth
million chance to get it right. I buy one
for a dollar.

We roll south and east, past fields of ripening
hops and wheat, high plateaus fashioned
from forgotten seas. Knuckled apple trees
untended at the edge of town. A for sale
sign flapping from a mothballed missile site.
The river where we knelt to kiss
the mineral rush of clear cold water.
The dreamy blur of miles.

In a campground, a herd of children
run free-range, their tracks beneath
the pines. Their voices ricochet
against basalt. Why is it now
that I remember them, of all the ones
we left behind? The way their
words chimed, calling us to look,
although I want to say they reminded me
of breaking glass, the way they traveled
privately and bare skinned into
the belly of their lives, not innocent—
we never were—full of harm and
yearnings, pitiless, proud, the mystery
of being, unhinged from time. Only
the seasons turned, only sun. Only
our bodies to drag us deeper.

Love, death, heat, gasoline. An apple
ripening on a slender stem, the makings
of a garden where no other than
the Other lives, the other one
you’d come to love if you would
love yourself, the child sleeping
in the dark. Bees pilot in from
ruined hives, their silver throats
tin cups to drink the world’s blank
suffering. Stench of slaughterhouse
in turned-down light, pumpjacks
along the highway, sexless beasts against
the sky, devouring. We all have ways
of whistling in the dark. It’s a fragile art
to breathe and settle deep into faux leather
seats beside your lover, crossing Lolo Pass,
eighty miles an hour, just after midnight,
stars, sober, a humbling mountain
range behind you.

 

 

Filed under: Poetry