I plan to drive 8,000 miles to visit
10 people I might not see otherwise
before I die
or they die
aside from cost
freeway driving the fact that I’m 77
I think I can’t but go
I don’t
attend funerals nor would I host one
dead means dead
the home planet
we’re ruining could end while I’m
on the road
my universe could
flip to an otherverse one me driving
other me dying
I might spaghettify
into the nearest black hole
A solar flare. A shooting star.
Raging & raving, the fellow
topples across the road
into the home of an old woman
with two yelping dogs. Whether she
asks him in or can’t keep him out
isn’t recorded in the formal
inquiry. Go, she says, but he won’t.
Mosquito, black fly, deer tick.
He grabs her phone when she says
she’ll dial 911. He runs next door
where an old man lets him in
though his wife protests. She knows
what the fellow’s up to, drunk
& disorderly. He wants more
drink & a shoulder to cry on.
Brown bats sweep the roofline.
She calls the police, because what
do you do when someone needs
help, someone who’s a neighbor
surely, but not family, not a friend,
only a local, an aging man, parents
dead, wife gone, children if any
grown & out of state, a broken
branch of a bleeding heart.
He needs what can’t be had
since priests have failed & police
can’t replace them. This two-bit
town in our soon-to-fail nation
has no store, no bar, no rest house,
no soup kitchen, no place to go
day or night. Drunk & disorderly
sirens yowl, blue lights blaze.
The fellow is a local. What good
is being a local if here includes
no community to take you in?
fawns crisscross sunshine
wildflowers daub the leafy loam
a congregation of songbirds
flit through a thicket’s maze
green meets green meets green
fetor wicks up from black mire
woodpeckered trees await wind
the lurch & whump of falling
the guard fox barks, yearning
fills the swirling clouds of gnats
silver of late afternoon
newts freckle water weeds
