The open arms of the West stand empty at a table in the Big Sky Cafe.
With a paper bag of Zen and peanut butter cookies, you are riding concrete rails,
Searching for a landscape that probably never was.

I don't know how you escaped their machine.
I had thought they could break anyone.
Possibly they rejected you, seeing you as I did
(once stripped, naked, defenseless), as a union of fragments,
Your mind popped, strange as a body's joint.
Possibly you left, branded and jeered,
Taking with you the only things you own:
Your Buddhist shaved head and Cherokee thoughts,
Your Romantic lips and cowboy drawl,
Your beatnik cigarettes and plain Amish hands.

You are not representative of anything.
You are not fit to represent.
"America," the man said, "Love it or leave it, boy,"
You were debating Kuwait over chicken fried steak.
You wrote, later, for you it was America, die for it or discover it.
(Despite the pine trees, despite the blind osmotic suck of the border,
Canada was really no option.)
You spoke of gypsies, you said frontier.

In my eyes you are a parasite, a snag in the gut,
Something tough and blue-eyed America breeds,
Tenacious despite the good water.

Five states away I grope to tell your story, to explain you,
To connect where you were with where you've gone.
They both use rifles, I think.
They believe in tradition, honor, big game.
Is that it?

Closing the letters there were always pictures.
You wrote of buffalo and red dirt,
Of black-eyed susans cluttering the shoulders of the road.
You wrote of past wars, of flowers, of history, of nothing at all.

Copyright Rebecca Whelan
 

The Arrow of Time

I wanted to kiss you in the planetarium,
Where the purified air of space-time,
Like cool water, would cycle through us,
And prick and sizzle stars inside our throats.
In that rarefied air, your lips,
Freshly cut with needles of starlight,
Would blossom like galaxies in the corner of my eye.
We could recline on bristly maroon seats
And watch the Universe be born and die,
The sun rise or explode.

I wanted to kiss you in the planetarium,
But I find myself less than halfway.
Dried-out on the tongue of highway heat,
I am less than halfway to the stars.

My tongue swells, a fat leather worm
Clotting my throat, and each tug, each word
Cuts the water to my hot-valved heart,
The breath to my wind-tired brain.
If only I could swallow sand,
Wish it into cold fluidity,
And have each grain be your homunculus,
Be you.

You probably arrived, into the dark cool blindness.
You're probably kissing Orion's shoulder,
Having scoured your brain of me.

Time, really being distance, is the shortest path
Between two faraway points.
Light moves in its cataclysmic packets,
Jangling in corpuscular sine waves,
Eventually connecting everything.

You would realize that, on the plush reclined seat,
In the cold recycled air.
What option would you have then, but to kiss me?
The kiss is the archer of disorder.
In the rarefied air, each contact between us
Would generate dark, cool rivulets, the space around the stars,
And light, tiny packets of it,
Shimmering from our anxious palms,
Our awkward elbows, our gnawed lips.
The  dirty taste of infinity.

I wanted to kiss you in the planetarium,
To push through a gap in space-time,
To teach you about constructive interference.
But I find myself less than halfway.

Caught in the shattered hourglass I keep,
Like instinct, next to my heart,
I am being cut open my time.
Sand enters my wounds,
Bleak and brown crystalline scourges,
Flaying me, time-trapped.

I had wanted to kiss you in the planetarium.
But I won't get there, in time.

Copyright Rebecca Whelan