92. Sleeping in Automobiles

Through the mountains seemed to be
New Zealand for a moment, in green and reaching,

systems of night, reticulations in extensions
and fissures of light, along outlines of mountains,

light of the radio, light of the headlight in the rearview
mirror, and what it had seen, reflections upon

our lamentations upon the muddy face of the earth,
despair and the ration, diction is action and evolving fields

illusory, the green of summered endings and night, the black
of being and, in being, been, torment, torture, torquing

the haft, though bladeless, swings through air, to flesh,
through heart, start and stop, and solid to the bone, what

heft forward to hit, to cut, to maim, to break, to punc-
ture the surest little of bit of all the rest of him, and

soar in a sweep was a hawk, not vulture, something unbald
and made for blood and bleeding out the heart, but in marrow

what stable balance, all in tow, that creamy blood can fake,
teeter on the edge of cliff face, bridge, or automobile, the balancing

moon eager for a swim through always night and th’alarm’s
a ringing can’t be cock whose crowing’s stopt, can’t be trash can,

can’t be car, alarmed and ringing for night’s last ending, can’t
be now and couldn’t be then, for the car swerves left following

road, pattern of white, in dashes, pattern of yellow, in lines,
and all boundaries interrupt what we can’t allow be interrupted,

the breath, the heart, lean eyesight in the darkness, touch of finger
to the touch of finger back, earword whispered into ear, and

awkward circulations of desire, waylaid by suspicion, susurration, sustenance,
like love and the twisting of headlight turning right with car along the road

that turns right with the weight of evening, and moonlit raindrops
on the windshield’s face, in streaks and stretching, water reduced to glare,

and the light of eyes, in blue in green in hazel and brown, that do not shine
but see, through into blackness, reflection of light, our own little noir

soiree, and the sleeping giant of a man, chest ripped, sleep impeded by
breathing’s pause and break, and breaking out in gasping, arm numb

and buzzing, what alarum could wake the night into shadows from trees,
or corpses of this zombie’d landscape, all that walking for the waste

of one brain in twistings and twistings into flesh, eggless for a morning
breakfast, but the mind erupts into the bald shape of an idea, and a flash

from the oncoming, maybe car, maybe truck, and blindness for that second
in the brightest darkness, sometimes seen as motion or inertia, either rest

or coast, slight swerve off and onto what shoulder is soft and the skin so
sweet, scents in wafting pleasures of a moment’s intake, but gravel or

loose stones collected in the face of time, and sprayed up or out, in
tinklings of stone to metal or off into darkness edging the roadway into

blank blackness, tree, guardrail, air, and descent, the various trajectories
of matter against the random order of restraint retrained into error, and

arrowpoint flight, the memoried one, once and never, agains enlisted against
hope, and whatever action against whatever stand of time against the solid

oak, alone in woodside silence, motionless excepting breeze, and sleep
upon the headrest, dreaming the possibility of dreaming it out into breath

or something more solid, like thought, and a spray of words presented,
as if now, as recompense for the locus of living, a heartbreath’s width

of blood and pumping, the heart of living, the heart of else, and in
the morning’s coming that pumping out, nacreous, liquid, warm as

blood, the white extension of the reddened self, into herself, so that
sunlight extends its warmth, in wet and saltiness, and what opens,

accepting, rests, arresting, spilling sunlight, in thick fat drops,
a little spasm to prove there was a night, undreamed, that continued

before folding back into itself and away, sucked into woods, into streambeds,
under stones, into the last intake of breath before the world awakes.