This is the way the road bent then, wide and sullen
across baked earth and I was with two bums
I’d picked up outside Meeteesee. That was a day
I thought being kind was important because the world
that summer was dust and rejection, and banners
of welcome in Red Lodge hung limp. I was drunk.
Heat soured the sky. The day would come I vowed
when I would fight. I bought a room for the bums.
The next day I gave them both money in Loveland
and waved goodbye and drove off smug as the rich.
How many years ago was that? What songs played out
miles of what should have been, on whatever station
the radio found leaking through acres of cactus?
What happened that day in Medicine Bow? Sudden snarl
of the woman running the motel. The knife I kept
under my pillow that night, convinced that here
at last I’d found the source of all evil, the final
disgrace, world ending a way no poet predicted.
My Buick was yellow then. This one is green and zips
to Laramie easy. The whole business that day
in Medicine Bow and Medicine Bow seem silly.
It may not have been here at all. The brown block
hotel seems familiar, but it may be the road, the way
it bends into town is wrong. Denver stations
are coming in clear and that time I got nothing.
When you drive fast, hay seems to fly.