I think white Formica counter Einstein's photo think
an Edward Hopper filling station rendered in negative
think "huevos rancheros" microwaved
How are they I asked (they were the blue plate special in
a Lexington Kentucky diner
Franny answered "green" I think
a used paperback Upanishads read in a jail cell in
St Albans Vermont
Outside off the lake a blizzard devastates logic
Then it's tonight
the interstate our Pontiac drives I think
Ionosphere except with lights &
Tonight must be world without end
Few things exist except breath & Franny
inhaling the smoke's last drags exhaling
white-haired smoke that's a nursing home in Orlando
Time's measured there by what disappears
Then 1961 materializes
November & snowflakes spitting across its etiolated air
its picture tube
& Route 2's only articulated by a black-&-white
restaurant
Into its beveled glass the parking lot then
telephone poles whole families get absorbed
So much for Fitchburg Massachusetts
So much for Grandmother who hauled inside her dress
a cedar trunk Prohibition Cowboys & Indians
Inclusive as a Volkswagen bus vacationing
& just as unsteady in stiff winds she moved
So much for American Primitive
Grandmother's a naive painting hanging in
a 51st Avenue gallery
itself an approximation of heaven Hear its
whispers they're crepuscular See
Grandmother's birches dwarfed next to livestock See
the children's exaggerated heads
It's stasis like Thanksgiving Day's stasis
Then it's gone then it's
Kansas streaking a darker void across the void
Houses annihilated to blue & white lights
the signals they continue to transmit I think
vectors dormer windows real time
See the horizon has already closed its lids
Soon she'll talk in her sleep
talk Origin of the Species Colonialism talk
phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny she'll say
"Father's nose Mother's eyebrows"
Franny's slouching into the bucket seat gone back somewhere
Savannah her parents' sold home the Blue Moon Diner
Her face in the rearview mirror is a black-&-white 3"X5"
is her father's flight suit is San Diego 1959 is
a Quonset hut is her mother's Sears catalog
Christmas 1960 forwarded to Kansas City
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL, 2