These are early drafts of some of the poems that are found in my 2016 collection of road poems Highway Sky
Her name was Gasoline;
she was my goddess.
I chased her down highways
and through years.
Driven mad by her
perfume and shimmer,
her invitation to ride,
whispers of adventure.
She ran me a twisted road
to strange cities until
somewhere in the traffic,
the heat of endless delay,
I stopped
and forgot the road.
But she’s still out there and
though her name is cursed,
she still smells like freedom
and wild younger days.
—
Chasing Westward
The vultures are heading west, their slow flying
shadow grace just an illusion of the blank sky.
Clock them. They’re racing away fast as thought.
Faster than often-repeated certainties and fears.
They escape with gizzards full, hurtling toward the sun,
shuttling some soul’s nourishing remains westward.
Out there, I hope, they’ll catch the day that never ends,
the place, I believe, night will never fall.
After sunset, I hear the rumbling highway, cars
chasing westward, chasing dreams, the fading light.
—
I wrote the poem the other day in response to some footage I shot a few months back. I was going to try letting the poem grow out of the video to see how that worked (there’s a great discussion on this over at the Moving Poems Forum), but as it turns out the footage I based the poem on is nowhere in this video.
Here’s how this video came about. Yesterday, I was sitting in traffic when my phone rang. After the call, I set the phone on the dash. While I was sitting there looking at it, I thought maybe I could turn the videocamera on and let it just film sky while I was driving. I did and whenever I came to a light, I’d just stop the recording and reset it in a different place, either on the dash or against the window. It never occurred to me until yesterday just how useful it is to have a perfectly flat camera.
By the time, I got home I had the footage and I thought this poem would work well with it.
The birds at the beginning are not vultures. They are grackles, and that was just a lucky shot. I’d love to have more than a few seconds of that, but they just happened to fly over at that moment. I didn’t even realize I had gotten them since I was watching the road. I left them in because I think it’s a cool shot and decided not to change the poem.
The grackles there work on another level for me too since this one feels like both a Highway Sky and a Birds Nobody Loves poem.
This videopoem is posted both at YouTube and Vimeo. Feel free to share it if you like it.
We Talk of Trains
Road signs, riddled with bullet holes,
executed for the mathematical precision
with which they spell out isolation,
define and witness the desert loneliness.
We talk of oceans, beaches beyond horizons,
valleys hidden in the mountains, extinct volcanoes,
ruins and the railroad tracks following the highway.
A crumpled taco wrapper flutters up from the backseat.
Someone grabs it before it escapes out the window.
Dust devils swirl outside, wrestling earth and sky,
spinning proof that everything only wants to escape.
We talk our dreams in circles, always
winding up at the same rest stop, a teepee-shaped
gas station, the movie we’ll make when we get home.
A train rumbles alongside us; sharp-edged
graffiti decorates boxcars. We wonder about people
who painted their anger on a train in Saint Louis
only to watch it disappear into the desert.
—
“We Talk of Trains” and the accompanying photo “Train in Round Rock” were first published together in ouroboros review #3 (July 2009).
My poem “Night at the Interstate Diner” is up over at qarrtsiluni. It’s part of the ongoing “The Crowd” issue, which also includes my photo-essay “The Minor Leagues.” Go check it out, and as usual, you can listen to me read it.
When the headlights
struck the stars
and the radio de-tuned
to static songs,
the highway dropped
away and clouds
grew shapes across
the galaxies below my tires.
And though my hands
still gripped the wheel,
I was now a passenger.
We read lines and studied rest stop signs to
learn the languages that govern highways.
Electric rivers flowed outward from cities
in red trails along the eastern highways.
We lived on the salty French fry grease and
fast food feasts of American highways.
We waited through summer road construction,
rebuilding and slowing northern highways.
In the mountains, we squinted through the dark
studying switchbacks to discern highways.
Green shadows crept across the road through
endless rolling tree-lined southern highways.
We avoided the rest stop stares of owls
and meth addicts on nocturnal highways.
In the desert night, lightning played with stars,
and we saw God on the western highways.
The engine downshifted, slow to grip the
road; tires clung like goats to mountain highways.
At night in desert motel rooms we laughed
and followed love down unspoken highways.
This is my first attempt at a video poem. I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.
Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic ap, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.
The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.
Here’s the text of the poem. The title is from a bumper sticker I saw twice last weekend while driving through the hill country outside Austin:
God Bless Johnny Cash
I drove to the river;
it followed me home.
Sweated the night surrounded
by lesser freshwater demons.
Sang pelagic chantys
heard second hand
from deep-gulleted
birds plucking a thunder bass.
The earth ate the moon,
broke the fall of morning.
Twisted roads passed tallgrass hills
that can’t remember trees.
In the morning, I prayed
the dusty pick-up truck petition,
God bless Johnny Cash.
Cars were rare along the highway
On that day of dusty miles.
You came up a ridge behind us to
Observe our passing.
Through the rearview, we watched you
Emerge, then fade back into the desert.
—
This is a response to Read Write Poems’ NaPoWriMo #27: Let Someone Else Take the Lead wherein Carolee invites writers to do an acrostic poem. I’ve never done one before, but figured I would need a short word for today and so I went with coyote, a favorite animal that I’ve heard far more often than seen. This poem is about the first time I saw one.
Though I’ve missed a few days of posting due to internet issues, I’ve been writing and back-posting what I wrote those days here and at a gnarled oak.
gasoline fumes
open highways
through memory
endless skies
& stars
asphalt
& awareness
we’ll never be
this way again
—
This is for Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo prompt “What’s that smell?” provided by Julie Jordan Scott.
As usual my NaPoWriMo blogging for the weekend will consist of micro-poems over at a gnarled oak.