By Mojave (email: mojave7299@yahoo.com)
Date: 8 March 2000
Going Eighty on I-40, Eastern New Mexico
Near Texas now,
nothing looks different--
same curving skyline
resting atop leagues of short-grass
vast like the sea.
Are we even moving?
Must be; the numbers
on the odometer change
and we've grown older
since first starting out
somewhere back
in some other world.
Little crosses at roadside
fly past almost like mile-markers.
Death? Here?
Here.
"Hey,
Billy the Kid's grave
is out there," someone says
and vaguely points.
But I don't see where.
All I see
as I stare at the road ahead
are the black knife-edges
of the clouds drifting past
silently in the blueness of space.
Space is what it comes down to
here.
Space, which is terrifying,
which is exhilarating--
like first sex,
first drink,
first loss of consciousness,
first loss
of self.
Even regret
has no pull out here.
I think of conversations
that seem impossible now:
"You have no idea
how difficult I can be," she said
before it got good, then bad,
then better, then ended...
Funny thing:
It all meant nothing
for that moment in that speeding car
near Texas.
But now, back here,
I'm racing as fast as I was there--
trying like hell not to become
another cross along a high-plains highway.
Back to the Heart-on-Sleeve Corner