I’ve never been able to sleep in automobiles. No matter how exhausted I am, I can never seem to tune out my surroundings long enough to manage it–and believe me, two weeks on a tour bus with 44 rowdy college choir kids (can you say that five times fast?) can get VERY exhausting. But alas, my wired brain hates me. So during basically the entire trip, as scores of my colleagues slumbered peacefully, I was looking out windows, taking embarrassing pictures of snoring friends, and trying to keep my creative process alive by writing, drawing, anything. Because if you’re gonna be fully awake for roughly fourteen days of bus rides, some good should come out of the torture.
I wrote the following poem as we cruised westward through the (highly interesting) Nebraska plains. Between the mental exhaustion, the bumpy road and the nosy friend I had sitting next to me, it was kind of an ordeal, but here it is. My first poem of 2016.
Drifter
Outside this humming capsule
of reclining seats
and recycled air
the world unfurls in our wake,
pavement skimming its way back to the place
we left in such a hurry.
Beyond barnacle-encrusted windows
the land crawls
and folds over itself,
a vista of gray on brown.
A fresh dusting of snow
drifts, caught between
hills that roll like shallow waves.
Though stationary,
the scene grants them a hint,
a glimmer of life
as the sun’s rays hang
refracted, reflected,
suspended in the air like a million tiny flecks of salt spray
and these once-frozen mounds of earth
become wind-stirred eddies
passing through a drifter’s nets.
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