After twelve years, you’d think the long stretches
            of black birch and dogwood I’ve endured
            on my drives back East would’ve painted me
            the way they inhabit the long Pennsylvania winter.

            If it was all a dream of cute, mid-atlantic odalisques
            and deep chasms holding deeper rivers
            then I am quite satisfied. For in the presence
            of such bodies I was humbled.

            Driving one morning I saw in the distance
            a semi-tractor flinch on the ice of I-81--
            I was on my way to Harrisburg to catch a train
            and the snow had been falling all morning.

            Bowie was singing s on my blue SUV’s CD player--
            “The Bewley Brothers,” real cool dreamers so turned on
            he’d made a sad song about their mishaps.

            So when the disk started skipping

            I thought about the time I slipped
            on my slick wooden porch, tearing my left knee apart.
            This is all the suffering I abide by--I’ve become
            a fool for the cold morning that finds me shivering.

            Somehow, I wish you were here with me
            cascading down the turnpike, stoned
            on the last tid-bits of a Beatles song that
            has wrapped me up & into the invisible highway

            beyond my hood ornament, shining on the Western horizon
            like one of Belle Starr’s tits. Listen: the deal is this--
            my sister sent me a telescope for Christmas
            and I intend to visit each planet again.
       

Copyright © Albino Carrillo, 2005. All Rights Reserved.