Road trip

Day 1

Fig jam mellows torn rye,
Muddled in goat cheese
And passed through the car.
No dinner today but movement.
Run clean on gasoline,
That’s the American way.
East, ever east, Nevada is
So green now.
So big now. Always was.
Open sky meets solar farms.
Languor is flooded sage
In old desert, stifness is
The breeze of Truckee river.
Mom says it’s cleansing,
Redolent in pine.
Stiffness always is.

Sing me home Sierra.

Egg shells in a coke can,
Clatter on now. We’ve only
Just begun our clamoring,
Our shattering. It’s so kind,
To call it a commencement.
Espresso would fill you better,
Affogato by the sea.
Ever onwards, and carry
The apologies that can’t be told
Along. There’s no fee for unchecked
bagage on a road trip. Hold tight.

Day 2

Short days evaporate the late-night planning,
Sleep still hesitates, deteriorates into memory
Like six inch biscuits, the last attractions
Of truck stop towns.
Floating mountains deocrate teh salt flats,
Edith eroded into the land. A pillar
No longer, but latent remains of an absent God.

Day 5

the day collapses into motion,
even stillness evokes the nauseous
propulsion of passing miles.
still like a waterfall, pounding
against the rocks in illusory
unmotion. i will always be
unmoving motion, dry,
wondering if i am empty.
the cuyahoga river brightly drips,
and i think i too was once a fire

Return

Day 1

Insanity leaks from the encumbrance of land.
Scrawling has long replaced halls with hands,
Necessity scrat hed caves from bare rock.

I huddle on a stranger’s porch, inches from another Baltimore storm,
And I am small, much to small to fill a single porch, much less a home.
The warmth of Hampden leaches into the earth while we hesitate
On the edge of the city like a dancer, tentative as the music plays,
And in hesitation is the couple whispering paired secrets.
How gentle it is,
      Vengeance through kindness.

Day 2

You pick apart a tawdry idyll of an evening wondering if small towns were always like this. You thought fireflies were nearly extinct, an dperhaps they are, but they are also here, burning constellations into cattle yards. You lick lemon curd and soft cream off a white plastic spoon, and realize you don’t know what fireflies eat. You don’t know whether they would like ice cream. You heard there were supposed to be fireworks tonight, but sentimentality already runs in excess. They are not missing.

You’ve almost forgotten the continuous stasis of the first twelve hours of the day. You let one hour wash over the rest like resurrection, like absolution, as though the warmth forgives the pain, not abets it.

Day 3

Here cities rise from bare earth,
Hollow mountains yearning, twisting,

                 naked,

Broken roads spill from crisp skylines
In strange comedies xeroxed
Off hand-drawn communist pamphlets
In underground bookshops in another city
Where mansions deteriorate and tent tenants
Multiply among teeming walkways
Opressed by wet heat and gravel
Is the only remaining monument of ancient cemeteries.
But here there is a park, a girl, a question:
Why are you content in this world that is?
Why do I want you to be wanting?

Day 4

I swim with my mother for the first time in twenty years.
Some of the play has gone away. Laps and therapy own the day,
No splashing contests to thrash a wave into a new Saint Louis.
We orbit the pool, the first break in days of travel.
I hate to call it gentle. But who else would have come so far?

Day 5

Two black b ears
Six deer
One pronghorn
Two crows
Uncounted squirrels
We measure miles in gasoline, not all the dead we’ve seen piled on road edges in obscene funerals, the remnants of cars careening through unempty deserts.