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Miles (Never Once Imagined)

Leftovers from a road trip in the early ’90s…

Cars near Meteor Crater

Miles (Never Once Imagined)

And we drove for miles—
And we saw those miles—
Drifting out toward space
Layers of desert air so far beyond the mountains
I saw the miles quicken,
Rising up like a beast from the steam of the engine
Outside Albuquerque
Again near Palm Springs
Jeep racing without roof, without doors
Away from Vegas with just eighteen dollars
from one-armed bandits
Leftover pizza hut and half a cup of jingling quarters
There were miles more to go
And others to go them with
So we only stayed in LA for three hours
In the desert that night we both finally saw
The miles to the stars
Humbled to behold and freezing
In the imagined terror of a Mojave midnight
I never could have imagined all the miles still to come
Nor the people with whom I would travel them
Just then
Just there
Everything was right
We had mountains to climb and never once imagined
We would change our minds

Published inPoemsPoetry

7 Comments

  1. Great poem. It brought me back to a month where I drove route 66 from Chicago to LA. I was reading Kerouac at the time, and there was a real tangible sense of all the traffic that went into making the legend that became route 66. Anyway, great poem, really took me back.

  2. Thanks, both of you.

    Scottage, It’s funny you should mention Kerouac because I think it was reading his books as well as William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that set me off on the road trips that sparked these poems (and some other work.)

  3. No doubt James…I actually purchasd Blue Highways a few weeks ago, though it’s in the queue….I think it’s time to move it up, to my next book after The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman).

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