Texas Backroads, Summer
Here is inertia with no end.
The ground itself contains it, breathes it,
And an immensity of flatness
Stunts us like bereavement as we drive.
This since sun-up. All the hours, the heat.
We're lost.
There's a tall unpainted house
Back from the road, its old air full
Of sad couplings and slow dyings--
Such tiny human efforts out here
In the endless unwinding of our nightmare.
Or suddenly, windows smashed,
An abandoned concrete gas-station
With high-necked Ethyl pumps and a wrecked pick-up.
Once some slow white-haired blacks
In underwear spitting on the ground as we passed.
Where we've come from recedes in our minds--
This place will have none of it.
The sun is bigger than belief.
Stopped, it's all silence, save for flies,
Dog barking thin over miles,
A distant freight, a jacked-up Chevy
Full of kids in dungarees and billed hats
Giving us the finger, living their future
Right now, right here, in this land of dusty scrub.
We start again. Move faster. We are sinking
Too deeply inside ourselves. Our new map's useless.
From behind tilted windmills, weather-dented
Water-towers, that massive sun slides
Like hot oil down across the windshield.
We're a long way our now, getting smaller.
We're leaving ourselves behind.
Slack, exhausted, totally unnerved,
We smell our dust, and still the road goes on.
That Night, Having Dinner
Driving me round, you are nudging it,
Trying to enter your old life,
As you show me the streets you walked, houses
You lived in, the window of the baby's room.
You explain it casually but I'm not fooled.
This disturbs you, opens silted
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