Blueberries

I think I missed my life.

It was a bus I decided to walk instead of wait for, a horizon drawn hard in pencil and factories. The motion kept my legs warm and the next stop had a shelter. Without the wind I was the only thing moving on the prairie.

Maybe it was going nowhere. Maybe the seats were a shade of velour like some bruise I woke up with and couldn’t remember getting. All I would think of while it piloted the dark was what else could be dreamed real. By the time I woke up elsewhere there’d be mountains.

Picking in the rain and at night giant fans would dry the berries. No sleep and no sun was my westward advancement. I was shy, from the city, in a wet sack on a rocky slope with migrants. We didn’t share a language so just grimaced at the thunder, flashing teeth and lightning in the gloom. All I wanted was hot coffee and dry socks, and sometimes a storm still feels that simple.

Chrysler Town

A dead armadillo on the side of the road, a buzzard considering us among this quarry blacker at this mile mark than the one before. This in my nostrils is the highway, horizon a heat smear and memory the red rinsed out of dirt.

I drift to talk radio, but he is changing channels. I blend the broken stories with side mirror scenery and wonder where we’re going this time. A flood that washed stilt houses out from under fishermen is the whisper static between segments.

My brother’s sleep against me is heavy, like gravity were eyelids shut on crazed asphalt. Trees sentinel deepen green as we drive south down nightfall.

I am eight, my father never old, never young, just always as my mother is ever elsewhere. She stands backlit, limned in gilt. He is scratched on rock like their tableaus were imagined sad destinies apart.