my car broke, the land’s heat
hovered above
the defunct road I’d rolled it onto
with the clump of empty, yellowish buildings
at the dead end,
the exit on the interstate being
there I guess
really only for the road that actually
goes somewhere
in the opposite direction,
its border as deserted as my part
until the eye caught
dust-colored cardboard-box-like houses
lining the red hill’s foot
far south across
the roar of highway.
The car was dead, useless
—no way away
from this place so I sat in the heat
with the windows up
for as long as I could stand it—and my
dog—waiting for the tow truck,
then rolled them down
a little, just a crack because I
feared some slasher-movie kind of incident,
cruelty that seemed
fitting here,
the sun being cruel
and the sharp sand grains—then
more, rolled the window
farther down, then all the way but even that
wasn’t enough, so I
opened the door
as if it had been years that I’d been
in there,
broke a seal, as if it had been
millennia
since someone,
some sort of mason probably,
with the hope and fear of anarchic times
had sealed me in
to preserve
—what for what?
—as if a living thing could leave its tomb.
I ended up on the car hood
where these birds I didn’t recognize
fed on locusts
it looked like. There was the
click of exoskeletons, a
remarkable display of leaping
—by the birds!
(it wasn’t flying)—
as they went by turns into the cloud, came out
invariably with a bug in the beak,
then went back in,
my dog tugging on the leash
but we were
free, me barely catching breath
in wonderment
at another kind of what.
