On the abyssal asphalt, in a vast
emptiness teeming with incomparable life,
Texas 118, through Big Bend
and the Terlingua ghost town,
darkness pools in inky water
that evaporates as the headlights crest the hills
ragged claws dig into the resisting stone,
unperturbed yet unhabituated to the roar of the engine—
just another hunger
between plateaus—
much like my own
—but mine are listless as the rusted
automotive one occasionally passes
reclaimed by prickly pears and
sotols bobbing their sylvan sex masts in
the emptiness, an emptiness
repeated again and again by the
echo of the civilized,
tamed animals,
for it finds itself Other
to wild abundance and fears
rejoining, a fear that
within me, like Ocyhroe, has
metamorphosed into perpetual longing.
already do I feel the wild grass
poking through my skin, early buds of fur.
Wildpath Library 