The Never Quiet Continent

I watched for provinces and states both, the wires go up and down outside the car window, always a Buick. in some places fireworks seemed to be for sale everywhere and I placidly but still curiously looked at the designs and words on signs, on walls, on box trucks parked and painted. when the sea was reached, past pastoral fields where birds formed visions in the skies moving moving moving; where infrastructure went past graveyards right in the middle of overhead highways because I suppose it’s wrong and difficult to move the dead even amidst worldly progress, and where hotels and motels lined strips,- I could hear the waves. carnival barkers hankered for attention and a ferris wheel gently touched and traversed the little heavens. I could hear crowds of people and in the night a man and a woman bumped into each other and fell in love at first sight. they were embarrassed about it,- and hardly really knew what to do. I don’t know what happened to them as the car moved on. in the north it rained and was serious and drab, melancholic, while in the south it was clear and bright and more spacious. a truck was on its side, under an overpass, and the yellow and orange and red fires, coupled w/smoke, all like Medusa’s hair aflame, scratched the air on an otherwise regular enough earth, like a small country trying to fight a larger one, the fire versus the firmament.

I liked much of the rest of the world there and felt sad for the truck and anyone hurt. almost every place I saw had industrial corridors bleak, grey, and also areas w/many units in buildings made for manufacturing and distribution. I could hear air brakes. and I think whistles. the air was thick. on the coast cargo ships slid the horizon line like ghost vessels and planes flew banners w/advertisements. the intercoastal bridge opened high, mechanically, and the world definitely and almost defiantly knew what it was doing. I looked around the stores and could smell the shirts they ironed on logos and pictures to. it’s a loud place for a daydreamer, a lost soul. yet- the rains in the morning sunlight strange and surreal were okay and somewhere still, the warm breeze must make the branch leaves to sway above grain and stone, near step and bench and water blue, in a place where later, witching hour dreams are borne, dreams one tries to remember, dreams almost sacred, dreams where one has a glimpse of a home forgotten.