This Is For the Silver of Highway

This is for the silver of highway


through Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, for
the idea of open road, how it makes of the world
a camera lucida—a timeless, illuminated room.

The psalmist felt this shine, wrote the womb
of the morning, wrote the mountains skipped like rams,
and the little hills like lambs. David Copperfield

begins tenderly, his voice earnest on the first
of eight tapes of the BBC radio play,
announces his desire to tell us the journey

of his life, while one October, in Wyoming,
herds of black cows turn into mythical animals
because they are black and shiny and stand head to toe,

bodies fusing in the bright sun, one tar-black body
with two opposing heads. Tar, tarmac, macadam,
asphalt, highway, freeway, interstate,

scenic byway while Copperfield is rescued
over and over by ignorance and luck combined with
his own good soul. Where am I? I ask gas station

attendant, cashier, hotel clerk. One August through
Ohio, I sweat up the steering wheel, seat, lay bags of ice
across my lap, hurtle past exploded tires,

wild anemone of wire and rind. You torrent,
you headstrong, they whisper. September, an Iowa rest stop
hours from anywhere, I watch a man unload

a lawnmower from his truck, the motor vivid
in the quiet air as he begins to cut the grass around the latrines.
A congregation of small, brown birds lifts

from the bushes as if of one mind and my body trills
with that highway feeling, of feeling the world
and mind are one. It's a giddy amnesia—history,

responsibility lose their dominion in February, in Nevada hills
mute with sage. It's religious how I remember
July, the air-conditioned relief of the Chicago Art Institute,

where grimy, the road still droning in my arms, my chest,
my inner ear, I want to explain to the becalmed tourists
the velocity of Whistler—the twisted, crossing, intersecting

lines of sight from boatman, wavetip, to wingtip,
to fin. I return to my car and navigate acres
of backhoes, dumptrucks, a massive construction

site ringing the hogbutcher to the world.
One June I get a speeding ticket in Pennsylvania
because the radio's playing an optimistic song

from the 1970s while the speed limit changes
and I am watching instead a farmer harness up
two golden draft horses, pull them right

to the porch of his house and a bonneted woman
emerges to admire them. I admire them.
Where am I? In a motel in Cheyenne,

filled with school kids and their band
instruments and the mountains are green,
because this time it's early, it's May, and David Copperfield

has lost both women he loved, two weak, incompetent
women and still I cry—this is how it happens,
passion and its unreasonable vaults of soul

and what fills me are miles and David's sad love
and the plain face of a girl holding a trumpet
on a Super 8 Motel balcony in Wyoming.

Where am I? The stuff of my life in boxes, thrown out,
whittled to a few books, a computer and some clothes.
I think I am suffering, but I don't know. Here's to

not where I'm coming from and not where I'm going.
Here's to gypsy movement (as my grandmother
calls it), the infinity of living between.



Connie Voisine


Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream
The University of Chicago Press
Posted over on Poetry Daily