Mileage
June 29 2009


20 miles
30 years,
I’m not sure how much distance
it takes
to write about the past.
And then
when you get far enough away
it all becomes clear,
the incomprehensible
obvious.

Because forgiveness
is so much easier than hate.
Because gratitude
displaces envy.
Because age wears away
a young man’s intransigence,
and distance makes things seem small
receding in the rear-view mirror.

It was a road trip to who knows where,
stopping
for the first hitch-hiker you saw.
She had blue-streaked hair
a pierced tongue
a rising sun, tattooed on her left shoulder.
You smoked dope
sat closer
listened to baseball in the middle of the night,
a tiny dot
hurtling across the prairie
— the dial, glowing green
hi-beams, like feeble pin-pricks
miles, flashing by hypnotically.
It felt
as if this small universe of steel and glass
was everything.

And then, when you ran out of gas
the car stopped,
the journey began,
the odometer
clicked over.