Snorkle

Dream #12: Indiana

In all the city’s open rooms
where we’d begged
and fought for scraps
the lights reached
a degree of brightness
unfriendly to older eyes

And so I left my girl
and you left yours
to play it straight for a change

My old car, the proven
rusted-gold jalopy
appeared on the outskirts
amid climbing graffiti and darker smoke
that made us glad to drive
west, beneath the big sky

Billowing magnet clouds drew us
past the midwest. We stopped
only once, to rescue a dog-
a staggering starving collie-
before the wide roads and gravid plains
of open earth absolved our speed

His panting head scouted the land
from the broken rear window
and when the last of the gasoline
sputtered to fumes, we found
the perfect spot- a clear rocky stream
and a path to white-veined mountains

Who knew I could build a home
or that you, in functional
plaid dresses, could smile from the
windswept cedar porch and ring
a bell or wring the heavy soil
from my lone pair of jeans?

On all the full-moon nights
we swam naked in the creek
made love on the dry bed
and forgot the hard mornings
of hard faces with stunned desires.
In that place, nothing fades

Our amber-eyed daughter
addressed the hum of the world
with bubbling white laughter
and we named the dog Indiana
for the state of heat and dust
where he'd lain in a pile of bones

What beauty: no more to claim the day,
startled on gray sidewalks,
when thick smiles erupt too sudden
to pretend a strange notion
surging with calm assurance
to the women we clutch

Or my rusted car, sold for scrap
and nameless Indiana
watching an empty road