BLUNT MATTER, unambiguous. On its surface, no moss or lichen grows. Sun and rain can’t make it glitter, nor wind coax it into music. Among its countless small, grey pieces, none are asking to be saved.
You can think of nothing more speechless yet less in need of speech, its inflections so flatly clear. There’s no un-man-made, earthly thing more lifeless. So much of it, it’s easy to forget once it was a mountain. Though you’re on the level, on the grid, you’re climbing cliffs of fall.
Nothing so resists pathetic fallacies. But being human, heading out alone, you can’t ignore how it pulls like tides under tires, shifts and slides, seems unsettled. Hauled by truck from somewhere else, its need-to-go tremors the road, moving you as you move, neither of you able to return to where you started from.
What can you know of anything so unlike yourself, without eyes or feet, without a drop of liquid in what cannot be mistaken for a shell? It defies comparison or care. Say only it is commonplace, and everywhere a prairie road can go.