A Straight and Winding Road

Didn’t know Jack, but as I sat behind the wheel of a silky Asian automobile
drove past open bars and gravel arteries smokestack finials seagull adorned
and crumbling onto industrial hotbeds contracted men sporting laptops waiting
for buses in the morning greenback chill—as I drove past incomplete children
in ill-lit windows indentured to keyboards war-whooping fantasies bits
of propaganda disguised as the mono patriotism of Mr. Consumer—as I stopped
for coffee at the dysfunctional diners of a fat and slowing continent eager to believe
I saw the sky open and a hundred clouds arrange themselves like the middle line
on a highway—a lazy congregation of ems inviting me to pass and pass everything
that was in front while my eyes bloodshot with sunsets and sunrise darted from
side to side on this road that dared to eat itself to cast itself out as the entrails
of the hundred and one dreams of the quick shadows which shadow-dance against
the burning sides of wasted lives late into the night—

and weary of such moral mortalities such poses and postures I spoke with a silent moon
concerning my regrets and I accosted ghosts with the one thousand impossible
memories crawling across my scalp and dancing through my still wistful eyes
which all day long had tried to understand the unending changes in this roiling land
of restless people—the unending changes pulling us all apart.

And I was falling apart—spent matchsticks and empty empties and flat tires sailed
into the backwood dens of deer to lie beside crippled trilliums and dead birds
everything serenaded by factories never that far away and leached into the ground
and into my soul to become the corrupt philosophy of futures amalgamations and income
trusts and Sundays on the deck and Sundays mowing the lawn and watering
the garden and picking up after the children and reading the news
where empty eyes stare out from foreign countries that seem to have fallen
from the known world as though they’re October leaves dancing with dense clouds
and icy finger already dead but dancing with comedic stiffness and a good press agent
always ready to reconstruct the truth and language to suit the means to suit the ends
to suit the needs to suit the fluid world which flows as innocent as the Columbia River
under a harvest moon that knows only what it wants to know and believes as much.


And I’m still searching for the first exit ramp to somewhere else and the night which sits
on broad rivers—the night which hijacks restless ducks and vagabond geese which turns
willows into bent crones lovers into desperation, mountains into plains—this night
in which I’ve wrapped myself as though the dark horizon’s an inviting arm as though
the sound of crickets and owls is a lullaby I’ve heard all my life as though travel
is the spring which melts impotent mountain glaciers as though time has turned
itself inside out—and time is ill and time doesn’t know which way to turn and time spills
out onto the unreachable horizon like dawn onto the I-beams the concrete the plastic
and the frenzy of the next line of trees the crumbling silos the infested apartments
the proud bridges the shoulders of lost people who wander east of my shoulder
south of a flickering light in a quiet alley where the doors are all locked against—
against a memory slowly walking by the liquor store the red-bricked mills
the all-night café a trumpet note discarded along the sloping shores of the Merrimac
the Hudson and the Mississippi the St Lawrence the Fraser and the Peace
and I hear the sigh of a continent stretching to lose itself before the doves, who have found
a roost in the eaves of an abandoned Ford before the stirring doves begin to sing
their natal song to all that is restless to all that in books in film in song in business
and in faith reinvents itself at an unsustainable fevered pace and calls itself this place.


This poem went to IBPC for May.