A Poem

For today, here's a poem I wrote about journeying.

travelers

the wide grey highway
spread on the landscape like butter.
we move because when we are still
we lose our balance quickly
needing the inertia of motion
to keep our feet
tied to the earth.
moving, we won't slip off the land.

our tired eyes, the grit that sticks
to traveling limbs, dirt under
our fingernails, these keep us.
people in lonely gas stations allow
their eyes to rest on us for a moment
and then flit away politely
from our messy wrinkled clothing
our too long cramped muscles
the car breath, the sighs, the stretching
the obvious stench of foreignness.

many people are static,
standing in one place solidly, turning
their heads this way and that
to look at the world around them.
the road never rises up and pulls them
along, they will wake with their heads
in the same bed, walk out the front door
and see an old sky through a familiar
canopy of leaves. smell the same smells.

me, I want to hold you here and there,
bring fragrance of new mexico into
louisiana until people look around to see,
what's the matter with the air in this place?
something is different.
find georgia's river banks
get caught in florida's trees. get red dirt under
my fingernails in alabama.

find snow in michigan, in minnesota. not to mention
canada, the intense wilderness of it all
the wakening home, the slight trees of my
childhood burning in wildfires
rolling prairies and lightning in saskatchewan
my own mossy rainforests in british columbia.

when we are not moving we will rock
each other to sleep, find ways to change the air
find knives to spread thick butter on bread
like wide highways winding
like snow on mountains and clean days
running. wake longing to see a new sky, to find
new eyes flitting off of us in lonely gas stations.