433 Eros, Fredericksburg

I can’t remember it.  They drive a big steel car up the highway..  They’re in the front seat.  He sleeps.  She dreams.  Beer cans roll around the floor, empty.  It’s hard to tell whether it is  dusk or dawn.  A right in Toledo, up the highway passed the land of his boyhood, bluegrass, teamsters, six-shooters, guitars, hot-wires, fists, a strange christ.  There is the future, a ghost upon the ceiling above the bed.  A small frame: Jesus looks up at a beam of light.  High-beams, headlights, vision.  They’ve been driving for hours.  She is the passenger.  She knows she is as important as the man behind the wheel.  They return home.  They waltz beneath every overpass, motionless.  No reins.  No bit.  The old hotels, old cemeteries.  Ancient grief.  Young skin.  Kaddish fills the auditorium.  A dead poet stands behind the podium.  A silk vision, a mandalic quilt of prayer born in peaks of young mountains, sharp teeth.  These mountains are old, dull teeth.  The colors are subtle, drab.  Beautiful.  Old culture in young mountains and young in old.  Somehow it makes sense.  Everything does.  Every number is perfect.  It was a beautiful vision.  Maybe the ghost found it and destroyed it.  It is a phantom now.  He carries it around on ceilings.  Too real for real life.  What a strange trinity.  Summoned from death by life.  To offer this unformed heart.  The potential of one.  Spit from between the sharpened teeth of an old mayan.  Erupting.  Your dead must have had something to do with it.  Their gift.  I’ve always been influenceable.  Like an old guitar in his hands.  They’re in Detroit.  His heart is Detroit.  In flames long before the city burned.  Some of us come down for this.  Who is the judge of our life’s pain?  Pain is the subtlety of the mission.  They drive past the old neighborhood.  The stadium, the train station, the graveyard, Belle Isle, an empty parking lot, the coney-island– reflected in all they see.  Her face flickering in the glass, a flying camera, the single braid the tangled hair trails behind.  For him, his old bow and arrow above the mantle.  Old ashes in their place.