There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?
 Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers,
 apt at the essential such as rearranging
 languages. They occur from route to route
 like savages who wear shells.
 “I cannot place him.” Yet I do.
 He must ascend indefinitely as airs
 he must regard his image as plastic,
 adhering to the easeful carpet that needs
 footprints and cares for them
 as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by.
 Such a day/or such a night
 reeling from cabin to cabin
 looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing.
 These adventures in broad/or slim
 lamplight,
  Yet the cars
 do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm.
 We never feel the scratch, they do.
 When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride
 on rubber going down a mountain,
 safer than trees, or sand, more preventive
 to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering
 The old manse and robins. One tear,
 a salty one knowing we have escaped
 the charm of being native. Even as your glance
 through the windshield tells me you’ve seen
 another mishap of nature
  you would willingly forget,
 prefer to be like him near the hearth
 where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs
 where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake.
  The plateau, excursionist,
 is ahead. After that twenty volumes
 of farmland. Then I must guide us
 to the wood garage someone has whitened
 where the light enters through one window
 like a novel. You must peer at it
 without weakening, without feeling
 hero, or heroine,
  Understanding the distances
 between characters, their wakeful
 or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring
 the slow sunset, the quick dark.





















Comment form: