The wind has come up  
and now there is a cloud behind the mountain.   
How many times did she tell me the story   
of my birth? The story ended when she’d say,  
and that was the happiest day of my life, and  
I’d feel a little sad because I’d had no child  
and would never have a day like hers. Sometimes,  
I can see the river bottom and its glitter  
of stones. Then a fish leaps in sunlight rippling  
the surface. Sometimes, I listen to the birds,  
our seers, the pileated always laughing. I’ve read  
the dead in dreams are never dead,  
and yes, it is their aliveness that is reassuring,  
their going on even as they leave us here. Just now  
the shadow of wings, and a far-off child’s voice  
shouting  Hey, Mom.

Full-on, no bullshit, no irony, yes Taco Bell 
where I can almost always pull together the 
cash to get dinner, at my brokest 
scrounging up enough change  
for the pillowy warmth of a bean burrito,  
extra red sauce, meant to be eaten  
behind the steering wheel in a parking lot 
or while driving, the wrapper crumpled up  
and thrown on the passenger side floor, 
leftover napkins stashed in the glovebox.  
In high school we’d ditch seventh period  
and drive 10 miles down I-5 to the closest town  
big enough to have a Taco Bell,  
where we’d house as much food as we could 
pay for, lounging in the pinkpurplegreen vinyl  
or the metal swivel chairs we’d knock knees under,  
giving each other dares around fire sauce,  
hoarding packets of mild sauce to douse everything.  
And forever, my love to the Taco Bell employees,  
who took my order when I was drunk or high or crying,  
who listened and fed me without too much judgment  
through high school and college and my thirties,  
and a special love for the two who pushed my car  
through the drive-thru, once, when it broke down  
mid-order. I couldn’t afford a tow until payday.  
They let me leave it in the lot. 
This is how I know labor is entitled to all it creates,  
and that given a chance most of us are helpers, 
we want to help people and to be helped  
by people, amidst the absolute and delicious  
loveliness of ordinary things. 

The new road runs along the old road. I can see it
still imprinted on the earth, not twenty feet away
as I drive west past silos and farmsteads, fruit stands and hogs.
Once in Kansas, I stood in a field and watched
the stars on the horizon revolve around my ankles.
People are always moving, even those standing still
because the world keeps changing around them, changing them.
When will the cities meet? When will they spread until
there is a single city—avenue to avenue, coast to coast?
What we call “the country” is an undeveloped area
by the side of the road. There is no “country,” there is no “road.”
It’s one big National Park, no longer the wilderness it was.
But the old world exists under the present world
the way an original painting exists under a newer one.
The animals know: their ancient, invisible trails cross
and re-cross our own like scars that have healed long ago.
Their country is not our country but another place altogether.
Anything of importance there comes out of the sky.
In Amarillo the wind tries to erase everything, even the future.
It swoops down to scrape the desert clean as a scapula.
Here among bones and bleached arroyos the sun leans
through my window at dawn to let me know
I'm not going anywhere. There’s no more anywhere to go.

One woman drives across five states just to see her. The woman being driven to has no idea anyone's headed her way. The driving woman crosses three bridges & seven lakes just to get to her door. She stops along the highway, wades into the soggy ground, cuts down coral-eyed cattails, carries them to her car as if they might be sherbet orange, long-stemmed, Confederate roses, sheared for Sherman himself. For two days she drives toward the woman in Kentucky, sleeping in rest areas with her seat lowered all the way back, doors locked. When she reaches the state line it's misting. The tired pedal-to-the-metal woman finally calls ahead. I'm here, she says. Who's this? The woman being driven to, who has never checked her oil, asks. The driving woman reminds her of the recent writing workshop where they shared love for all things out-of-doors and lyrical. Come, have lunch with me, the driving woman invites. They eat spinach salads with different kinds of dressing. They talk about driving, the third thing they both love and how fast clouds can change from state line to state line. The didn't-know-she-was-coming woman stares at she who has just arrived. She tries to read the mighty spinach leaves in her bowl, privately marveling at the driving woman's muscled spontaneity. She can hardly believe this almost stranger has made it across five states just to have lunch with her. She wonders where this mad driving woman will sleep tonight. She is of two driving minds. One convertible. One hardtop. The driving woman shows her pictures of her children. Beautiful, the other does not say. Before long words run out of petrol. The woman who is home, but without pictures of her own, announces she must go. The driving woman frets & flames, May I walk you to your car? They walk. The driver changes two lanes in third gear, fast. The trunk opens. The Mario Andretti look-alike fills the other woman's arms with sable-sheared cattails. Five feet high & badly in need of sunlight & proudly stolen from across five states. The woman with no children of her own pulls their twenty pounds in close, resting them over her Peter-Panning heart. Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise. For two years, until their velvet bodies begin (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to woman passes the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like. Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love: spiny oyster mushroom, damson, salt marsh, cedar, creosote, new bud of pomegranate, Aegean sage blue sea, fig, blueberry, marigold, leaf fall, fogs eye, dusty miller, thief-of-the-night.

When the light goes out, and the book is set down
by the bedside, it all comes flooding in:
the story you are reading; the story of the day;
the understanding that it is a story, the day now past,
those ahead, the clock-hand sweep of time;
that you are the hero of your own story;
that it will end in death but along the way come
triumphs, misadventures, nuptials, tears;
that the story contains several plots and connects
to countless others; that you will never read
all the books collected on your shelves
but as long as you breathe the hero lives,
pages will be turned; that stories keep us alive;
that stories end—the tale of the drunken shoemaker,
the tale of humankind—all stories,
however beautiful, ingenious or corrupt;
that fables are forgotten, myths corrode, gods
vanish with the languages that named them;
that darkness swallows the world, as in legend,
but night in turn is vanquished by dawn;
that even the sun, whose radiance authored
life’s unpaginated complexity, will someday
dwindle to extinction. Or so the story goes.