You should probably read more while driving.
Something thick, with more adverbs than verbs,
or at least a lot of semicolons.
Hardbound with a torn yellow dust jacket,
or with a drippy brown circle left behind
by someone else’s mug of coffee.
Not in the dark, though
nor on the Grapevine in the dawn fog.
They are still talking about last week’s thirty-one truck and car pile-up,
Just after seven in the morning.
Where was I that morning? Somewhere else foggy?
Still sleeping, rumpled pajamas, in the breaking lemon-colored daylight?
No, I was driving too that morning.
Driving north, day of fullness ahead,
Some kind of appointment already forgotten.
Reading Whitman’s Memoranda During the War,
And “The Nation (‘till then incredulous)
flush’d in the face.”
The bearded man in the Bohemian-ish coffee shop
now rolling at 70 miles per hour.
Though turning the page at that speed does require some deftness,
And there was fog after all, I think,
Rolling off the grassy wetlands.
See, I said aloud to Whitman, you love freeways.
