Sun sinks into the cleft
between the night and day.

My desert highway universe
becomes two hemispheric bowls,
one incandescent blue, rimmed with fading fire ahead,
but shading to inky blackish blue behind,
and set atop the other, murky black and brown.

My headlamps
light a gauzy path through desert dark
that seems to billow up and out in waves;
this highway, a pale jetty in a sea of darkness.

The dust and daubs of yellow moth juice on the windshield
form a tattered veil before my sun-tired eyes.

The darkness is a soft black blanket of deceit.
My eyes see nothing, and my mind, with faith in nothing that the eyes
don't see,
whispers,
There is nothing;
no rabbits, cattle, deer or elk.
There is nothing but this road, closing away behind you,
opening up before you,
and no end to a journey that is not a journey.

But in the distance now I see two shining rubies,
or rather, one, at first,
that splits like a binary star as I gets closer.

If they are on the road, they are moving.
If they are not moving they are off the road,
the sleepy voice inside suggests.

I keep my foot down hard.

Then the thing ahead lights up, at once,
As if by lightning.
A rusty red pickup truck, stopped,
half on the road, half off, the driver's side door open wide.

And in the middle of the road sits
an old woman, left hand clinging to the inside handle of the open door,
craning her old neck in to look for something on the floorboard.

Perhaps my headlamps help her find it.

I swerve and just miss her.


 
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