ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

 
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL


Franny says "rest stop" I think "infinity"
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 childrens' 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

Where is she
Her lids closed too        long drapes the troposphere swirls
convective swirls disturbing beyond
beyond her blue irises
& then she must be flying
sheer out windows through clouds beyond "Gestalten" then
barometric pressure
drops descends vertiginous then the whoosh
swooping tumultuous July 1965
The storm-front accelerates through her

through her great-uncle's farmhouse Boon County Missouri
White curtains rustle drumrolls
Microbes the Methodist organ The Times-Dispatch all stir
electrocuted alive as lightening zigzags    See
the old man's forehead it's titanic it's
a Grant Wood reproduction brooding nimbo-stratus it's
an Edgar Lee Master poem assumed
into New Jerusalem
So Much for Transcendentalism
So much for Walt Whitman

Franny's one among quadrillion raindrops
falling 48 hours past across
Indiana's fractured blacktop they showered across
the windshield        she says "Frieda Kahlo"
Immense eyes crying
black maize crying abortions crying
menses the moon's darkside big sky she falls through
Welcome home
The Midwest's uterus
swelled saturated with souls she's one she's shimmering
She's her parents' 63 Plymouth shimmering in
a silent home movie
& the car emerged as glistening crossing
the Kanawha Christmas 1966
the freezing rain sparking in headlights    I think

Naked singularity I
think Orphic fragment
Typeface whirling across the egg-brown page the bloodstream
metabolizing Tuinol Rheingold I'm in
a Syracuse New York bus station
February 1975 it said "I am
the child of earth & starry heaven but
my origin is of heaven alone"
My pupils constricted minute as Alpha Centauri the
Police requested ID arrested

transients they escorted out into
Boreas whistling sleet Country-Western ballads whistling
meteorites lost in the overcast
I think parsecs think
"Surprise Symphony" pulsed through the Pontiac's cracked
    speakers think
supernovas    the windshield spins white starlight the
headlights constellate golden within the
rearview mirror the
V-8 repeats "Who are you" roared but

But it's night
But it's night
Above Abilene the full moon moved as effulgent as large
as a John F Kennedy half-dollar but
it's much larger now
It's the Sunday New York Times
its pages turned to the crossword puzzle's page
There are things I've only learned from Life magazines
like quasars like conspiracy theories like
Prehistory DNA Sputnik
women's underthings from 60's movie reviews
But Kansas tonight is larger than the known world
I ask myself
What's it like to not be alive
What's it like to be a thought & I think
Descartes high-powered telescopes "Heartbreak Hotel" think
virus split-level ranch homes built post-War
think the truck plaza's lights at 70 mph think

What's it like to be two places at once
A town lost as Biloxi a Delta 88 parked brokedown
Above its vinyl roof moths hover   yellow bulbs
strung up across the gravel parking lot
Give up the ghost
The roadhouse is closed I believe my soul's loose
Catalpa's bony fingers reach down Sweet Jesus

Would I ask to be born again
The Gulf's air's drunk & saline
The backseat's a cradle
The ripped upholstery sticks to my white shirt I
can see my body
abandoned as Bill Monroe singing "Hiding Place" see
boots propped against an ashtray it's full as a graveyard &

What's it like to be two places at once
Nobody else home only the air conditioner only
a Louis Armstrong record
"What a Wonderful World" spinning
sound waves through a Houston apartment
Only palmetto bugs
gliding like the Wright Brothers as awkward or
in Boston
4 am on Washington St crystal methedrine
reciting at 78 rpm's & silently
Psalm 22 hyperventilating    in
Lyman Wyoming cupping a match lighting up a
Lucky Strike leaning against the brass laughing Buddha
The first puff's "The Cloud of Unknowing"    He sits
androgynous squat manic amongst
junipers old as Christ he gazes toward
the liquor store but
tonight's a Rothko canvas stripped of scarlets except
taillights it's broken white lines I think
I could be anywhere think
curved space think
Soul music for instance when

Franny adjusted the dial the dashboard
shuddered "Distant Lover" transfigured seraphically
hopeless (it was St Louis
oscillating still 90 miles west ascending
So much for Paradise Lost the Mississippi rolled
as always sleek with motor oil as black

as LP's she learned to slow dance to
So much for the Father of Rivers
It must have been that morning how many
millennia past
The Sons of Morning sang for Joy she was so much
younger those days like a joy-ride        &
the fm digressed
fading drifting Franny sang she said
"So many miles away"    she was
colors her Ex's palette knife scraped visceral was his
rage his psilocybin was
Cycladic Idols was the faceless Matriarchy
ossified in the Richmond Museum she was
her mother's department store
May Day window display the silk mums wired
was a black wallphone's buzz ripping up night was
Grandfather's cancer
was finches singing in the St. Louis Zoo

So much for the birth of Rhythm & Blues
one minute after Jehovah moaned "Let there be Light"
It must have been like
the "Big B-B-Q" sign blinking outside Topeka
half the bulbs burnt-out
It must have been like the Rescue Mission's
loudspeaker at 6 am roaring from the whirlwind in
a town sullen as Albany New York
March 1976 the voice echoed
"Exile" & alcoholics shaved with the shakes

So much for Wingéd Eros
So much for flatted sevenths for the sensorium
So much for Primordial Chaos
It must have been the Terrestrial Paradise then
San Leandro 1944 Chief Petty Officer
Hayes on shore leave he squints his pupils contain
the Philippine Archipelago Destroyers

& Bette
sitting under the citrus sky the date palms
which form quarter notes
which play "White Christmas" as if it's broadcast through
a cathedral radio
which must have been like Vermont 1956
Snow scrambled the TV picture the snow swarmed
spermatozoa flailing toward ovaries
seconds prior to my existence
I'm sure no lights were on    I think
X & Y chromosomes unzipping twining think
Creationism United Nations think
nuclear fission think Expanding
Universe "The Wonderful World of Color" I think
the Baby Boom then

Here comes tonight here comes
the traffic's metallic flux the current
rampaging over Interstate 70 flooding because
the Milky Way has overflowed it's streaming
hubcaps grilles chrome aerials
Here comes Franny
aloft in her parents' pre-Civil War
Madison Virginia house 8 miles high here comes
Frank Baum here comes Kansas here
comes Ursa Major spilling nihilism here comes
a Mack Truck's 20 ton momentum
here come Saturn rockets the Highway Patrol the glow
a Coke machine glows at 11 pm because it's a
Giant Red Star athrob beside the Exxon station &
here comes nothing except

the white-scarred sky Lord Jesus
How your Seraphim wheel
Wheels within wheels    Cirrus clouds
trail silver her father's jet fighter's vapor over
a grain elevator's silhouette        I ask

Which way's True West
Who's crossing Jordan River who's
sparkling drifting through its depths who's
looking up from underwater like
a Chevy truck sunk in a quarry looking toward
more darkness
Mamma Daddy it's your blue house it's
Crystal River Florida submerged in
humidity pinetrees time        I ask
Is it darker here I ask

Where are you Franny

Not orbiting Jovian planets
Not in suspended animation she's not
shivering rapid-eye-movements under blankets in
a Baltimore motel after the Orioles-Red Sox rain-out
No towels no soap
Not staring at an Old Testament epic televised in
a Nashville Illinois USA Motel
streptococcus replicating insider her larynx she's
awake    Franny asks
"Where's Colorado"

Earth rotates under radials    I think
rest stop think
inexhaustible java the round-the-clock
truck stop brews the cauldrons seethe the Otherworld's
glass doors rattle swinging they breathe hush-hush closing
consciousness out & the freeway out
The spigots & griddle hiss the spirits hiss I think
Wovoka a defunct C & O depot I think
the water tower straddling the state line at
Texarkana think

coffee pots more spherical than this globe they're gushing
Cadillacs Joplin Missouri fossils in fact
an entire Petrified Forest the boxscores &
a sentence in a Dreiser novel I skimmed over
they're boiling they're pouring
a Gideon's Bible's cerulean covers a black-covered
Thus Spake Zarathustra scanned smashed in Denver under
cumuli congealing &
they steam they gush
pre-Socratic fragments a stegosaurus
they're pouring out Hank Williams'
"Kaw-Liga" they're cascading everlasting
harmonicas & 5 & Dime stores I can't see anything
except Ike's
photo in the Bellows Falls Vermont Post Office 1959 &
a black velvet paint-by-numbers Jesus blessing an 18-wheeler
on sale at the Albemarle Virginia County Fair
September 1988        they scald they pour
a drive-in movie screen a Buffalo Nickel but
this is not America
This is what America sees when the lights go down

So much for St John on Patmos
So much for the Great Revival I remember
a Dallas newspaper smoldering on the median strip
Grass burning glossolaliac it's
Route 30 1 mile west beyond
Lake Ray Hubbard a Mustang breaking the speed limit zooms
past the Pentecostal Church        I think

"No-boundry-condition" &
"A Love Supreme" along kilocycles
shaking from Lincoln Nebraska honks
Be-Bop but reassembled in light of
Quantum mechanics I think
Franny's returning to her body

Light particles bombarding our 78
Bonneville they scatter across the dash across
the Levis the t shirt the spectrum coalescing
across her skin I
think Chinese Dragon think Medicine Wheel I think
Kundalini think my hands
scaling her vertebrae the steering wheel's grip I ask
Where's Oakland California mother
Where's the River Ocean where's
the Uroborus
OK I promise not to ask for eternal life I ask
What did I sleep through
"Infinity" I think  Wait a minute        it's
Franny's face turned toward the window her face reflects
mercurial the highway's glare where it's
dispersed across the maroon hood        I need
a smoke        the pack's crushed I think
the cigarette lighter's coils electrified
gleam galaxies wired together I ask
"What's it like to be two places at once"
Anywhere & here
15 miles east of the vanishing point
waiting at Goodland Kansas


Jack Hayes
© 2010