The winding road is bare-faced, of sea to plain to mountains to sky, to drive is to fly, eyes wide open.
In the thin whiteness, thick with white, I am the anchor, cold on warm is cold.
And we forget to turn on the headlights, and the storm is larger than life.
After that, the bed is warm.
Sun, rain, snow, hotcoldwarm, Denver, in lurid ski jackets and temperamental.
Avenues glance off one another at right angles all with names of other-than-here
...the laid-back city of matter-of-facts.
Here the Great West: red man killed by white man paints in rose and gold the Manifestation of Destiny
and unmindful girls chatter over Tex Mex, free fly little birds you mind not your warm nest.
Leaving (on a jet plane) a piece of heart on the dirty snow, this is not my family
Plane
to train, drunk men abrasive, home?
is 2 windows facing a wall, clammy March, steam tables, drear.

Bare-faced discontent.
After dreaming in white for days,
Storms of red and blue emails and gray bay hurt more than snowblindness.
A smaller, harder bed.
A point in time, temperamental work ethic--
the avenue of the post-vacation vocation.
As a matter of fact, there’s nothing to say
but that the Pacific Coast is more westerly but less Western
and there is no nest to be found here.
heart? irrelevant
Plane? expensive
Drunk? ...homework...
as March turns to April

home?
girl uprooted, two thousand miles in search of that question mark
like Carmen San Diego, dotted lines tracking similar triangles across the paper United States
except no one watches this game show.
Here to there to two years later just scribble scrabble on a map
with no direction but hundreds...
So time, then, is no arrow
but a free variable
offers no sanctuary to the wandering soul
and try as she might, she won’t find an insurance policy entitled Everything Will Be All Right.
At least not for a reasonable monthly rate.
This makes the phrase ˆhome is where the heart is˜ terrifying.

(Spring) break-from-the-ordinary
A severance, all in all a terrible idea
Kind of like braking snowboard on a flat stretch:
You have to back-foot unbind and do the awkward shuffle to the crest of the next hill...
...which won’t be until August.
But that’s just the way it is.
Find me a student who would just as soon do away with Spring Break and I will eat this poem,
ugly words and all.
The winding road is bare-faced, Christmas to midterms to siesta to finals.
To drive is sometimes to fly and sometimes to face-plant.
Eyes are wide open (except in Solid Mechanics)
2 years, a patchwork, like this poem, a comedy,
Encore.

03/26/2010

Posted on 09/20/2011
Copyright © 2024 Cassandra Leigh