For Robert Kramer
A man is driving on a highway,
darting through little North American towns.
Lulled on their wires by Northern winds,
traffic lights sway above the streets.
It is spring in the middle of February,
he sees it in the color of the earth,
a dark rose, like a wall in Sicily.
He revels in his car's world of thoughts,
his heart sometimes pounds in an unusual way.
The baseball fields are covered with kids,
two of them are building a hut in a garden.
The car rushes forward, rushes faster,
the brushwood loses its sharpness,
everything quickens, the sky's blue bleaches,
the white weeping willows are laughing on the side.
There is the quiet humming of speed.
The man follows a structure,
something with a beginning and an end,
a highway where he watches how things
strike him on a path that he has chosen.
He is dazzled by an army of crosses,
marble crosses in a cemetery which
suddenly loomed out of the sun.
A statue of Jesus in the distance
joins its two green-stoned hands in prayer.
His dreams are all over the place,
strings of their laughter lying in the dusk,
his car dashing into something
looking more like a dawn than an evening.
The car is filled with American voices.
