Drive
Angie Haley
The sky is dark and the desert
wind whispers like insistent fingers over the windshield.
There is no moon.
I have been driving for what seems like ice
ages, and before my eyes the highway
wavers like a mirage, drawn in swirling dust.
It seems like everything here is coated with dust.
My windows are open to the empty desert
and the mindless drone of the deserted highway,
and the world has become what I see through the windshield:
a vast silence. My spine crackles with ice
and I find myself wishing for the moon,
just a tiny thumbnail of moon,
but this sky is singularly owned by blackness. Dust
parches my throat and again I feel that ice
on the back of my neck-only a tendril of desert
reaching out to me. The windshield
reveals no answers, only this unmarked highway.
Sooner or later we all come to a highway
like this, under a sky with no moon.
Sooner or later we all look out a windshield
like this, swept by dust,
onto trackless and barren desert
like this, and in that moment the icy
hand of something dark turns our own fingers to ice.
This is a highway
where we take the desert
in deep, into our bones, and are swallowed, like the moon.
On this road we are reduced to the dust
we are, returning spiraling onto the windshield
of the next passing car, a windshield
the next passing driver stares out of, ice
forming in his eyes. And to dust
shall he return in his own time, here on the highway,
unnoticed, without even the bland pale face of the moon
to gaze at as he becomes part of the desert.
I have become dust as I drive this highway;
I have become the windshield through which the moon
is swallowed; in the icy, hypnotic silence of road and sky, I have become the desert