The Man in the Road

Driving in a kind of dark,
behind me the city-filled valley,
bowing in light.

Out here a kind of silence,
merely a measure of distance from the babel
and not the thing itself.

Someone could be shouting at me

from the dirt and gray dark 
beyond my headlights,
and I would never hear him.


Someone could be stepping out
from the dark and into the round,
yellow-dead eye of my headlights

and I would be looking at the radio

and not at him in the road.

He could be there, maybe alone,

just born out of the desert,
having wandered for days, skin
dripping with dirt and sweat

like rusty blood,

and this road
could be the wish he made days ago
before he fell once more to his knees
on the granite floor—
a rock 
he knew before only as countertop,
the polished, cold place

where water comes gleaming 
out of metal
when you wish it to.

— 2010