Monday, August 11, 2008

Route 191

Moonset.  Red rock country a black mystery

in the wee hours, dawn a deep blue over

the eastern cliffs.  Over the horizon

Larry King blows rhetorical smoke rings:

The static crackles on my AM receiver. 

 

This is Utah: Land of Sego lilies,

the Mormon Tabernacle,  Uranium-235.

The state song whistles through my window.

Does the wind know these things exist

together here?  I smell only sagebrush.

Venus hangs over the highway before me.

 

King takes the next caller, a Montreal

psychic.  “The Midwest drought will last

well into the next century,” she says. 

“The serpent will tighten his grip

breathing clouds of locusts on our farmers’ crops.”

 

“Until what year will this drought last?”

King asks.   “Which will be hardest hit,

Indiana corn or Kansas wheat?  You psychics

are good at making vague prophesies

but lousy with accurate predictions.”

 

I listen to the woman’s hesitation—

a rush of breath, a sigh released

two thousand miles across the continent.

My hands clutch the steering wheel hard

as I wait for her tongue, like warm honey,

to rush through my limbs.

 

This is America: the voices race

by the clouds, reverberate in my brain. 

I remember Revelation: if the psychic,

Queen of Locusts, separates the wheat

from the chaff, Larry King will reign

over the next millennium. 

 

But at 6 A.M.  when the national signal

shuts down and the radio waves

evaporate into the clouds

I’m left with nothing,

just the cold Utah

dawn, the red

cliffs.