He’s only got thirty-five bucks,
by the time he gets there,
but he’s been alone long enough
to know he can be charming again.

The Days and Knights Inn
is never going to be the same.

The guy who’s sitting two rows
behind him swears he can hear the heartbeat
of the person who’s been drawing him closer
and closer to her for the last ten years.

Without so much as a cross
to wrap around his fingers, he’s as hopeful
as the girl near the front drinking root beer
and eating Ritz crackers while pretending to read.

She’s the kind who can’t look at a novel
without the words scrambling softly to form
one or two critical images from last summer.

The Japanese kid trying to get as much of his jacket
over his shoulders as he can isn’t going to pay
attention to a thing
until he gets to California. He’s hoping to be lucky enough
to see at least part of what his grandfather saw
when he took the trip in 1952.

An old woman with too much makeup
noisly bites into an apple in the adjacent row
and forgets where she’s going.

Old towns spring to life
and crowd the highway with everything
that’s been hiding under all those floorboards,
but the bus seems to go right through them anyway.

It’s that kind of mid-morning rush. It’s exactly the kind of energy
that’s smarter than the young and older than those who wait
for their great-grandchildren at their deathbeds.

Whatever song you hear the most
while trying to start your car at five in the morning
is right at the part where you can will that bastard to start.

It’s too rare to be magic.

Naturally, no one is going to
figure it out.

That’s the compromise,
and it could be a lot worse than that.

The guy with thirty-five bucks
to create the best road movie possible
turns to a young woman who doesn’t mind
taking up smoking again if it means
seeing everyone back together for a night.

He asks her nicely to wake him up in an hour
and goes to sleep while one of the tires
beneath him explodes but goes on
as though it didn’t happen.

01/30/2010

Posted on 01/30/2010
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