Friday, February 20, 2004
when bigger was brighter
It was after three days of chase
without sleep, sight or
experience that I knew:
I cannot close him.
Nab pulls me aside to a gas station
with a roof on three legs.
All the truck-driving patrons
sip their coffee and watch
us sit in our booth. I recognize
a face, but the name has run too
far, and I recall what it is like
to wake remembering a dream
without words or images—
just emotion slipping away
like a tide that will never come in again.
I sit there and cry as Nab watches me
closely over his coffee that I know
tastes like tar, but he does not say anything
about the tar or the chase or everything
worth sitting in booths worth crying over:
even Carmody before he changed,
ideas before balance sheets,
the times when bigger was brighter
but now only seem farther—
even naïve, as if effort equaled audacity,
as if the thought of getting up right now,
out of this booth and going back out to face
is nothing but the next line in a script
I have lost.
without sleep, sight or
experience that I knew:
I cannot close him.
Nab pulls me aside to a gas station
with a roof on three legs.
All the truck-driving patrons
sip their coffee and watch
us sit in our booth. I recognize
a face, but the name has run too
far, and I recall what it is like
to wake remembering a dream
without words or images—
just emotion slipping away
like a tide that will never come in again.
I sit there and cry as Nab watches me
closely over his coffee that I know
tastes like tar, but he does not say anything
about the tar or the chase or everything
worth sitting in booths worth crying over:
even Carmody before he changed,
ideas before balance sheets,
the times when bigger was brighter
but now only seem farther—
even naïve, as if effort equaled audacity,
as if the thought of getting up right now,
out of this booth and going back out to face
is nothing but the next line in a script
I have lost.
