We both know the smell of a convenience store at 4 am like the backs of a lotta hands.
She sells me trucker crack Mini-Thins like Vivarin. Doesn’t make me feel awkward about it.
She can tell it’s been a long drive, and it’s only gonna get longer.
Offers me a free cup of coffee, but I never touch the stuff.
Besides, I’m gonna need more speed than that.
We notice each other’s smiles immediately.
It’s our favorite thing for people to notice – our smiles.
It’s all either one of us has to offer.
You can see it in the way our cheeks stretch out like arms
wanting nothing more than to say “You, are welcome here.”
She -
shows brittle nicotine teeth with spaces between each one.
Her fingers are bony. No rings. And she’d love to get’er nails done someday.
One time she had’er hair fixed.
They took out the grease, made it real big on top, and feathered it.
She likes it like that.
She will never be fully informed on some things just like I will never understand who really buys
Moon Pies, or those rolling, wrinkled, dried-up sausages, but then again, she’s been here a lot
longer than me. She’s seen everything from men who grow dread locks out of their top lips to
children who look like cigarettes.
I give’er my money. I wait for my change. But I feel like there’s something more happening here.
I feel -
like a warm mop bucket and dingy tiles that’ll never come clean.
I feel like these freezers cannot be re-stocked often enough.
I feel like trash cans of candy wrappers with soda pop dripping down the wrong side of the plastic.
I feel like everything just got computerized.
I feel like she was raised to say a LOT of stupid things about a color.
And I feel like if I were to identify myself as gay –
This conversation would STOP.
It’s what I do
I feel.
I get scared sometimes.
And I drive.
…But in 1 minute and 48 seconds I’m gonna walk outta here with a full tank of gas, a bottle of Mini-Thins, and a pint of milk while there’s a woman trapped behind a formican counter somewhere in North Dakota who wants nothing more than to hear my whole story. All 92,775 miles of it.
I can tell, though, she’s heard more opinions and trucker small talk than Santa Claus has made kids happy, so I only find the nerve to tell’er the good parts; that she’s the kindest thing to happen since Burlington, VT and I wanna leave it at that… …Because men - who are not smart - have taken it farther; have cradled her up like a nutcracker and made’er feel as warm as a high school education on the dusty backroad, or a beer… in a coozy. I feel like she’s been waiting here a long time for the one who’ll come 2-steppin’ through that door on 18 wheels without makin’er feel like it’s her job to sweep up the nutshells alone when she’s done been cracked again. A man who won’t tempt her to suck the wedding ring off his dick, but will show her - simply - Love. She doesn’t need me or any other man, but she doesn’t know that either, and I’m just hopin’ like crazy she doesn’t think I’m the one because the only time I’ll ever see North Dakota again is in a Van Morrison song late LATE at night. I Promise.
Y’all, I feel like she’s 37 years old wearing 51 badly, dying inside like certain kinds of dances around fires to speak through you, a forest, if you weren’t so taken with sparks.
But she wasn’t given those words. She has not been told that she can definitely change the world. She knows some folks do, but not in convenience stores and NOT with lottery tickets.
So I finally ask’er what I been feelin’ the entire time I’ve been standin’ there still getting’ scared like I do sometimes, really REALLY ready to drive, I ask…
“Is this it for you? Is this all you’ll ever do?”
Her smile
collapsed.
That tightly strapped-in pasty skin
went loose.
Her heart
fell crooked.
She said,
not knowing my real name
“I can tell, buddy, by the Mini Thins and the way ya drive,
That we’re both taken with novelty.
We’ve both believed in mean gods.
We both spend our money on things that break too easily like… people.
And I can tell that ya think you’ve had it rough,
So especially you should know:
It’s what I do -
I dream
I get high sometimes.
And I’m gonna roll outta here one day.
I just might not get to drive.
open his head,baby
& you’ll find a heart in it
(cracked)
open that heart,mabel
& you’ll find a bed in it
(fact)
open this bed,sibyl
& you’ll find a tart in it
(wed)
open the tart,lady
& you’ll find his mind in it
(dead)
Out of the night that covers me, In the fell clutch of circumstance Beyond this place of wrath and tears It matters not how strait the gate,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The dove descending breaks the air Who then devised the torment? Love.
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.
All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour,
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
That chill is in the air
Which the wise know well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
Will soon be under snow.
The sun sets in a cloud
And is not seen.
Beauty, that spoke aloud,
Addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here
To feed on what has been.
Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.
II
Branch by branch
This tree has died. Green only
Is one last bough, moving its leaves in the sun.
What evil ate its root, what blight,
What ugly thing,
Let the mole say, the bird sing;
Or the white worm behind the shedding bark
Tick in the dark.
You and I have only one thing to do:
Saw the trunk through.
III
Distressed mind, forbear
To tease the hooded Why:
That shape will not reply.
From the warm chair
To the wind’s welter
Flee, if storm’s your shelter.
But no, you needs must part,
Fling him his release—
On whose ungenerous heart
Alone you are at peace.
IV
Not dead of wounds, not borne
Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn
By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,
But stung to death by gnats
Lies Love.
What swamp I sweated through for all these years
Is at length plain to me.
V
Poor passionate thing,
Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!—though not so far as the forest.
Unwounded and unspent, serene but for the eye’s bright trouble,
Was it the lurching flight, the unequal wind under the lopped feathers that brought you down,
To sit in folded colours on the empty level field,
Visible as a ship, paling the yellow stubble?
Rebellious bird, warm body foreign and bright,
Has no one told you?—Hopeless is your flight
Towards the high branches. Here is your home,
Between barnyard strewn with grain and the forest tree.
Though Time refeather the wing,
Ankle slip the ring,
The once-confined thing
Is never again free.
THE hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream’s sake.
I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt
For a dream’s sake.
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream’s sake.
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
