[identity profile] icarusblood.livejournal.com
Hi everyone! I'm looking for poems about coasts and cities to try and find inspiration for a photojourney that I'll be going on in a few days. I come bearing gifts, or rather a gift. Here's a poem for you (:

Road Trip- Kurt Brown

The new road runs along the old road. I can see it
still imprinted on the earth, not twenty feet away
as I drive west past silos and farmsteads, fruit stands and hogs.
Once in Kansas, I stood in a field and watched
the stars on the horizon revolve around my ankles.
People are always moving, even those standing still
because the world keeps changing around them, changing them.
When will the cities meet? When will they spread until
there is a single city—avenue to avenue, coast to coast?
What we call "the country" is an undeveloped area
by the side of the road. There is no "country," there is no "road."
It's one big National Park, no longer the wilderness it was.
But the old world exists under the present world
the way an original painting exists under a newer one.
The animals know: their ancient, invisible trails cross
and re-cross our own like scars that have healed long ago.
Their country is not our country but another place altogether.
Anything of importance there comes out of the sky.
In Amarillo the wind tries to erase everything, even the future.
It swoops down to scrape the desert clean as a scapula.
Here among bones and bleached arroyos the sun leans
through my window at dawn to let me know
I'm not going anywhere. There's no more anywhere to go.
[identity profile] aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com







A' 49 Merc

        -- Kurt Brown

Some one dumped it here one night, locked
the wheel and watched it tumble into goldenrod and tansy,
ragweed grown over one door flung outward
in disgust. They did a good job, too: fenders split, windshield
veined with intricate pattern of cracks
and fretwork.They felt perhaps a rare satisfaction
as the chassis crunched against rock and the rear window
buckled with its small view of the past. But the tires
are gone, and a shattered tail light shields a swarm
hornets making home of the wreckage. How much
is enough? Years add up, placing one small burden on another
until the back yaws, shouler slump. Whoever it was
stood here as the hood plunged over and some branches snapped
a smell of gasoline suffusing the air, reminding us
of the exact moment of capitulation when the life
we planned can no longer be pinpointed on any map
and the way we had of getting there knocks and rattles to a halt
above a dark ravine and we go off relieved-
no, happy to be rid of the weight of all that effort and desire.

from " More Things in Heaven and Earth"

March 2025

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