I swing up the highway towards Accotane,
where a new brand of gas is to be named today.
The birds singing outside my window can't keep up
with the sound of a cassette in the darkened hallway.
Stars crash down against my windshield
at the rate of one per minute; many I don't see.
The head is splitting but I'm amnesiac;
each morning finds me in a different bed,
the same room, sheets a little duller brown.
The compulsion to meet my fate by collision
with a silver screen drives me on, selective
and uncertain, judging the curvature of the earth each moment
for a clue to the incidence of grit in my cornea.
A companion, more sensitive to the guttering drain
he can make some cars
sink and some cars rise
I got into my car. I drove it
so it joined other cars in a long,
noisy line between one city
and another. To my left
another long line of cars
moved from the city
to which my line was
going to the city I'd
just left. When my car
and I arrived, I stopped
it and left it amongst
other stopped cars. I
entered a building. On
one of its upper floors,
I entered a room. I sat
down. For several years
If you’re his wife, you’ve quit
asking why it all piles up out there
in the yard for everyone to see
from the highway. Hubcaps from ghostly coupes.
Beer signs in neon cursive. Coke machines,
cars, cars, cars. You keep the house
and the backyard according to your principles.
You hate the mechanism in men
that drives them to love machinery.
If you're his dog, you
urinate on tires encircling weeds.
You sniff varieties of rust,
chase squirrels until they disappear,
until you ram your hot wet nose
into angle iron; it all
makes the yard difficult.
Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.
The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.
The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.
Two brown ponies trotting slowly