Road Trip
Over the singed and brittle roadside stalks,
over cotton, corn and stubble,
our car’s dark bug-shape slithers.
Over the metal drainpipe, over the oil rig,
and the burned field where a windmill
cranks its pinch of rust, we are
a hurried sweep of shadow, a sleek chromatic
gleam the cold sun follows
with its blue-orange dot of concentration.
We scurry like a flea across the hide of something
both immense and underfed,
a creature from the mind’s culvert,
an animal concocted out of barbed-wire ribs
and cockleburs, the grass its rippling fur
through which our small wake passes like a shiver.
