A Handful of Dust
He was some other guy in the rooming house,
an old hand with a prairie sun-beat face.
Every morning would find him out and gone
somewhere working
after the truck picked him up in front before light.
Sometimes I saw him returning in the evening
or eating in the cafe on Main Street
or the coffee shop in the motel out on the highway.
In the rooming house the rules were posted and plain:
No cooking in the rooms.
No lights or radios on after ten.
No girls in the rooms.
No liquor in the rooms.
My friends and I would sneak girls in
and sneak them out again,
hustling and whispering down the hallway.
We sneaked in beers and stacked
the empties against the wall of the room.
The leading citizens of the town
drank at home and sneaked in and out
of each other's back doors.
The farmers' sons would drink
in their fathers' cars
in a little spot near the old highway
under the cottonwoods
and near a curve said to be haunted
by the ghost of a woman who had been killed
when her car had hurtled
from the curve at high speed.
It seemed to me that all the roads were haunted.
When the wind would bend the grasses down
it would raise from the earth a spirit voice,
especially at twilight.
The long gentle rises and long glides of descent
and the roiling knots of muscular shoulder
twisting broadly into troughs of gullies
and broad dry washes,
and the sudden twilit ridges form a land
that rolls and breaks like an ocean.
The road shimmers and twists on its back
and shoots through it like a solitary hope.
Empty bottles go out the window
with no notes.
This is not a story I can tell
because it is too many stories
and yet it is not even one.
It is a handful of dust,
a flash of photons on a memory plate
of a face weeping in a phone booth
to voices weak and grown cold
away in Wyoming and Nevada
from too much time on the road
beneath stars that glow
so far above us
and so far from each other.
One Sunday morning early
his hard boots struck the hallway
staggering, torn clothes, bloody and still drunk.
Beaten in a brawl in some bar
in one of those towns
whose names sound like solid bellies
and lie like rocks in a line along that road.
I heard his voice slur and mutter
and the sudden, shrill flutter
of the landlady's voice in the hall
rise in strident and shrill confrontation.
Then his footfall carried him
up the stairs in my ear
and the landlady and her husband
sailed out and walked to church
broad beamed across the sidewalk
like two ships that had seen steady service
in a mete and just war.
In an hour he was down and cleaned up.
With his small gear on his shoulder,
his back became small down 13th toward Main.
I lay back down and tried to crawl
and scratch my way into a dream.
But when it came its music seemed mournful
and almost too soft to be heard.
And I was afraid of the gleaming whiteness
to which I seemed propelled.
Was it a star, a pearl, or a tear
frozen in the center of the American heart?
He was some other guy in the rooming house,
an old hand with a prairie sun-beat face.
Every morning would find him out and gone
somewhere working
after the truck picked him up in front before light.
Sometimes I saw him returning in the evening
or eating in the cafe on Main Street
or the coffee shop in the motel out on the highway.
In the rooming house the rules were posted and plain:
No cooking in the rooms.
No lights or radios on after ten.
No girls in the rooms.
No liquor in the rooms.
My friends and I would sneak girls in
and sneak them out again,
hustling and whispering down the hallway.
We sneaked in beers and stacked
the empties against the wall of the room.
The leading citizens of the town
drank at home and sneaked in and out
of each other's back doors.
The farmers' sons would drink
in their fathers' cars
in a little spot near the old highway
under the cottonwoods
and near a curve said to be haunted
by the ghost of a woman who had been killed
when her car had hurtled
from the curve at high speed.
It seemed to me that all the roads were haunted.
When the wind would bend the grasses down
it would raise from the earth a spirit voice,
especially at twilight.
The long gentle rises and long glides of descent
and the roiling knots of muscular shoulder
twisting broadly into troughs of gullies
and broad dry washes,
and the sudden twilit ridges form a land
that rolls and breaks like an ocean.
The road shimmers and twists on its back
and shoots through it like a solitary hope.
Empty bottles go out the window
with no notes.
This is not a story I can tell
because it is too many stories
and yet it is not even one.
It is a handful of dust,
a flash of photons on a memory plate
of a face weeping in a phone booth
to voices weak and grown cold
away in Wyoming and Nevada
from too much time on the road
beneath stars that glow
so far above us
and so far from each other.
One Sunday morning early
his hard boots struck the hallway
staggering, torn clothes, bloody and still drunk.
Beaten in a brawl in some bar
in one of those towns
whose names sound like solid bellies
and lie like rocks in a line along that road.
I heard his voice slur and mutter
and the sudden, shrill flutter
of the landlady's voice in the hall
rise in strident and shrill confrontation.
Then his footfall carried him
up the stairs in my ear
and the landlady and her husband
sailed out and walked to church
broad beamed across the sidewalk
like two ships that had seen steady service
in a mete and just war.
In an hour he was down and cleaned up.
With his small gear on his shoulder,
his back became small down 13th toward Main.
I lay back down and tried to crawl
and scratch my way into a dream.
But when it came its music seemed mournful
and almost too soft to be heard.
And I was afraid of the gleaming whiteness
to which I seemed propelled.
Was it a star, a pearl, or a tear
frozen in the center of the American heart?