Real Life

Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.

I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving

Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,

Moving to country music & the heart

Is torn a little more because the song says the truth.

Because in the thirty-six things that can happen

To people, men & women, women & women,

Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound

To be broken somewhere along the line,

That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing

With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds

Across America

In the sap green of the tropics,

Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age,

At the white impossible ice hour, starving,

Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down,

Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire,

Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones

Of an Indian who died standing up,

Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset,

To live the thirty-six things

& never comes home.