The Highway

the highway leaps half-formed
out of my shaking fist;
sometimes you set out for Rome
but end up in Ceylon, Siam, or Budapest

your voice is a seashell echo in my ear
and the earliest wash of dawn is a blue violin
while my boots chew
on the loud roadside gravel
and the frost manufactured
overnight

my mouth, the sky, the grace of youth,
and other things, too, which you have touched:
they shuttle past in the faraway
commuter lanes:
they never stop for me

the highway, its nerve endings reach up toward me;
in the cold the asphalt draws tight, shivers and cracks
as tractors lumber across frozen fields soundlessly;
I know every morning there are birds
that chirp and twitter outside your window

the highway is a hypodermic pushed in, into the vein of the land
to draw blood; it bruises the whole arm,
the precise pain communicated
from cell to cell, a shared grief
which then becomes dull

your every single breath only needs the right vibration
to transmute into a sigh, a moan, or a scream;
the frost looks back to see if anyone
has followed

I drive off the road and you tumble into my arms
in the middle of nowhere,
some farmer’s barbed wire
in my teeth and the fender

forever is only ever a precise measure
when it comes to love;
in the middle of now here
the highway draws its knees up
under its chin

You veer into me, hundreds of miles per second
the way forests collide with the sky
over millennia,
the way starlight fades away as morning,
pulls into the rest stop where we lay;
and, breathing, we wake to see how we are divided