Long Distance Every Sign

Steven Heighton
From:   Ecstasy of Sketpics. House of Anansi Press, 1994.

Long distance every sign —
another poem the road gave you.
Another song the aerial
sucked out of sound waves into the car
far gone
on the freeway filed to sand behind your tires
or the forest trail growing in behind you
or the paddles' footprints, fading
in a bay at dawn, as ice knits closed after your stern
and keeps pace —

At the wheel could you feel above you
the sun's wheel turn
and shuttle you into dark, and home — and see
the dashboard's green galaxies at dusk
evolving, burning and by dawn
burnt down
                      (I want to wake at the wheel still driving
somehow changed, want you there beside me
as the road unwires like a heartline, lilting
and we near another elsewhere
want you there at the wheel, at the wheel
I still believe
for as long as it turns
I can clutch the sun I can steer and
brake time to a hold — )

These times I still believe in every poem the road gave me
though at daybreak they shrink away
like a distance every sign, and the road
that seemed by night a bare arm
unbroached by any watch and reaching
ah, into dawn, emerges

Mondayed —
bone-beige —
manacled with quartz —

                               a scar in the suburbs

of a clock-skulled place.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

Steven Heighton's works copyright © to the author.