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Show DRIVING HOME TO SEE THE FOLKS Asleep at the wheel nearly dead I think and feeling nothing on my skin but the dark eyes of the antelopes all around me in the Wyoming night watching me pass-a small animal growling down the highway with both eyes aglow. To keep awake I force my head out the window as into a guillotine the black sleet-filled air slipping under each eyelid like a child's thin silver spoon. Looking back into the car through the ice and tears I do not recognize that body sleeping there. I no longer know that leg pressed hard to the gas, the blue coat or scarf or the hand reaching out to the wheel. Folks, you know I am doing my best - pushing hard toward you through this winter sky but reduced to this - just this head out a window streaming through space like a bearded rock, a hunk of pocked iron with melting eyes. A trail of fiery mist is growing out of the back of my head and stretches now for miles across the night. The odds, I know, are a thousand to one I'll burn up before touching earth but if somehow I do make it home smashing across the farmyard and lighting up the sky I will throw a red glow across the barn's silver roof and crash into the rough wood of your back door smaller than a grain of sand making its one childlike knock. (continued, stanza break) |