Route 66

I’ve been to every town in the song

thumbing rides and lugging a duffel.

I don’t know who I should blame or credit

–books or television.

Buz and Tod or Jack and Neal.

The restless culture,

–or the culture of the restless.

Where meaning is sought

like a modern day pilgrim

moving through the geography.

In a car, usually.

I still have an admiration

for 1961 Corvette roadsters.

Or rolling through the desert night

listening to songs on the radio

bounced off the ionosphere

and piped out the speakers

of a shoebox Ford.

It’s in the meat and marrow

of the American soul.

I’ve been to the cornfields,

the onramps, the crossroads

trying to flag a ride.

The devil never stopped for me,

just the bored or the kind.

We swam in the rust red water

of a New Mexico flash flood,

got speckled with freckles

when we dried.

The season that lingers is the one

with moonlit cricket choruses

and the scent of alfalfa and orange groves

kissing my nose. Where the

midnight asphalt remembers

the black heat of midsummer noon.