Poetry
The Hitchhikers
C. E. Whitehead
(Westbound, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, 1976)
Their presences drop back as haze
into no early light.
Rounding the devil's own blind bend
the road's winding settles into us
and we forget
those other possibilities
lining the highway and the way back
as if they could stop the wheel's dry spin,
the leaves of asphalt.
We drive on,
nothing to follow
but engine's echo curling
through the canyon.
Vermilion sinks into black behind us.
Ahead, the distances compact against us,
who are always spiraling into that point.