Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder,

the froth of noise the undersides of the cedars make, the windblown dark that hints and fails for hours at effacement— maybe I could claim it isn’t praying, but it’s asking, at the least, begging that these lungfuls of this blackness eat whatever keeps on swelling and collapsing in my chest, and be done with it, no more noise left hanging in the spaces between brake lights than a smothered rush that sounds like suffering and is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn’t so much easing from my throat as shining like black light from my torso, veining the leaves of weeds, stoning the whole roadside in a halo—I can feel the heat of truck lights on my back, I’m inside that brilliant gravity, I think of time, I’m in the driver’s nightmare and it shudders by—