TruckStop

Truckstop


We stopped here three years ago, "just to get our bearings",
Just Married scrawled in soap on the back window.
Our buick's backseat sagged with books on flying buttresses,
petalled windows, gothic stone spires that spiraled
like spinning tops. We wanted to make stone fly
and glass bloom. In the diner, I take orders;
the same truckers, same shirts, checker game plaid,
but no one makes a move. "The usual," they say.
You chop tomatoes, onions, baby carrots in the back, your knife
slippery as a fish. The smell of fried egg coats everything.
Earlier that morning, we found stones, flat with ridges, fins and scales.
They were caught in the chaparral.
When it flowers, the air will taste of butter.
This desert was once an ocean with whales huge as eighteen wheelers,
their bellies crammed with plankton, dried peas, car parts. We want a world
that will become what it is not. Where the road bends,
someone has painted a virgin on a shack wall, no babe,
just a cactus pear in her arms. With my pocketknife,
we cut scratches into her throat. We want to give her gills.