In the model of a haiku chain, here are our travels recorded and ordered, a map with unusual lines, an occasion for a big and fragmentary place and for the people who move through it like light lost in a web of shattered glass, an unordained narrative.
Charged with summer force,
Philadelphia
shimmers like a fantasy
in our car mirrors.
I had never known how
unfathomably
Chicago swells from
the lake and deep plains.
At the close of June,
Dave falls in love with crickets.
He whistles in the morning,
furls our tiny tent.
We rode dawn to the Badlands.
The banded earth lay
in low sunlight, exposed,
the farmer’s nightmare.
Though I’ve known it for years,
the Dalles in clean daylight
confirms all suspicions.
There is only one.
Owen’s fine camera
seems a canny tool among
the old giants lazily
sucking light from the sky.
Synchronized barges
light the Bay evening
for independence,
flashes in the fog.
Some magic in my half-nude romp,
I think, across shadowless
boulder-drifts turned me
nut-brown as a lizard.
Basilica, thought Dave;
he may have meant God.
Basilica, I thought,
staring at the organ pipes.
A low causeway marches
in on the lake bed,
offers humility
where it can, and grace.
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