Cold hands and warm feet, we drive
with the windows down and the heat on.
 
The road is two hundred and seventeen miles long, longer.
 
We drink wild turkey in our 1pm coffee.
Neatly, you spread tuna on a cracker so it’s bite-sized.
 
All the visible light rests on the world we travel through.
 
We are not two Gretels who have dropped
knots of bread on the road to find our way back.
 
The road has been taken up behind us in the raven’s slippery feathers.
 
We are not afraid of the future.
We watch for animals.

                                         The graves, our tears. Parked bumper to bumper, the cars make a grief train. The people in this picture stare loose whispers sleuthing those faces we haven’t seen for eleven years, each of us believing what the other says

                What do you know about a guy who yells to the brick sidewalk— and the woman walking on it—and who orders a four-cheese pizza? Don’t you ever ask yourself what this all means? God. God’s son. I can’t believe for the longest time it means nothing

                                                                           And that’s what we refer to where there are people encircling the skyscrapers—society doesn’t have anything to do—with them. Their arm-in-arm kindling igniting the rich. Different people—lacquered in suits with dimpled ties—work the city. Held above them is simultaneity

                                                           One can be blind and be a watchman. We get to the airport eight hours early and sit through two movies. We, the people in this theater—I have only this getting home

                      A best friend exploded from a steel mill and a Mexican man, with no next of kin, turns lapis in an open casket while the girl’s hand, greased with petroleum jelly, slips the black stone from his ring finger. The world works like that—it speaks to you when you listen and you listen when there are things that nothing can explain
                 
                                 At the on-ramp the billboards went up all over the city I thought they were advertisements but they were signs, calls from the lost book, calls of faith and I still don’t understand

                            I ask the guy who ordered the four-cheese pizza to repeat what he called the woman’s breasts. “Bodacious Ta-Tas,”  he says with pride. I say, thank you. I thank him

                                                                  For the Autumn light I steal film. I steal to tell myself I am not dying. How is it done? To keep at it long enough, to feel the garden of my life and the broom. Each night the dead are more dead

                                                                                  If all events are related what story do a satellite crawling across the sky, the coyotes’ frenzy, the acidic stomachs of the homeless and the death of my grandfather construct?

                                                                      Dessert is the wrong question, as soon as the waitress asks, and she knows it. I know it. We just never say anything

         You tell me—during dinner—about a documentary on the Southwest. The Colorado was a natural water source for the desert: no: the Colorado was dammed: yes

                                                               We talk in Phoenix, the city of fire, the city that defied nature. Zoom in: to the world’s tallest fountain, the tallest fountain in the world

                                              No matter how many times the sky pulls apart no month happens any worse than another. You and I drive among the network, operating a machine that I could make our death—the phenomenal light

                                                                             I swerve to remind myself that I am me performing a sequence of events—I have left in parts—my mind already with him. His body, which I can no longer see, having dissolved its cells into a portion of field—exists in death

                                    I am happy coming around the corner, but your face prepared me. An early morning ringing—tears wrung out of the wires. It’s been hours and you have taken the phone outside. You can’t hang up—putting the phone back ends receipt and begins acknowledgment

                                                 On the way out we stop at the hostess’ desk so that you can fill your pockets with toothpicks and candy-striped mints. The hostess approaches us as if we might be trying to figure out how to open the cash register, which of course we are. People are more than symbol—people—not being known by others

                   The songs on the radio answer all of my questions if I let them. Windows down we keep the music off. You read to me from the personals “uncensored” section. We wait from Wednesday to Wednesday for this. One has “ankle restraints and more”; another says he’s been “reincarnated as a nice guy” and one “feels-he-must-and-hates-himself-afterwards.” Whom do you believe?

                                  There’s a quality to being transported by an aircraft— regardless of the direction the plane actually flies it feels forward in time on the outside, but on the inside, backwards to the East and its past—a sort of illuminated limbo challenging gravity

                                                                  The rain is necessity, as if the sky plus my grandfather’s death must make rain. This makes sense as a page seen once in a photo album, and recalled in the proportion of accident conveyed to the unbelieving eye. A memory, a photograph, a thought one pauses over, but has no explanation as to why it carves through the eye to the brain, repeating itself like rows and my grandfather and me standing in his corn field

                                                            We evaluate at the end of the meal— so the restaurateurs can play our songs: no: so they know where to advertise: yes. One can be blind and be a guardian. We, the people, chased by a coffee

                              In the aircraft we advance, but have little to say about it. The truth is there or the embarrassment of thinking it’s there is there. Where is the device? Walking down the aisle of what happened to the sky. The sun doesn’t marry the blossom. There has to be one element of grace left—a sunrise beautiful even though the color is derived from pollution

                                                                    I am afraid to know specifically. Encapsulated, we move because the machine around us moves. My grand-father doesn’t move, being caught in a hit

                                                                                  Landing—in the event of a water landing. What do the airline associates know that they think we do not? Visible elsewhere in the atmosphere—time being altered—as in flight—the past is the present and the past is the future

                                                      I left myself leaning against the tray-back that had me on a porch with the sounding waves. In the waters my life rose up from underneath me, my hips, the hips of the waves

                                                                     Under the ocean it is not silent. Not for one second is it silent. Movement cannot be silent

                                                                                          Brown leaves slip over the graves. Eyes swept against the stones. His hands folded around the black book. I remember him clearly. I always will. I am alive and I pull a blanket over me