The Oregon Trail

Pain
is plain
left
on my seat
 
In the bus
we didn’t sit
together
long
 
or long looked
at the country long
legged out the
window
 
legs to down
mountains to
plains
my sea, going
 
home
An eye in the
back of the head
almost no
 
hand given
you, if any
casual
traveller
 
no one
no
human
is
 
We talked
anyway
You
told me
 
all about
your daughter
son in law
 
and the
Mormon life
you had as a girl
on that farm
 
in Idaho
they (daughter
and her
husband? don’t
 
know at all
in Los Angeles
Or I don’t
gone on
 
past Boise
and the watered
plains down to
the river
 
and in the night
stops stop
one by one
the ways into
 
Oregon
or it might as well
be gone
another
 
world?
Home or
no plains
or no
 
more than
the empty seat
close enough —
You didn’t have to

hold back
what you did
hold back
whether it was
 
failure drunken
husband moron
grandchildren or the
kicked life without
 
any money
to get out of
The sweated
seat
 
slides on
night
past to
Bend, Oregon
 
no one’s got on
to take it
since you
got off
 
Your heavy
wet smell
is still all over
it all over
 
me, all
eyes and no
hands
Running in the cold
 
at the breakfast stop
at dawn at the
baskets of flowers
hanging on the streetlights
 
The closeness to
almost leap the
gap
is there.
 
 
— 17 Jan 63
Cambridge, Mass.
(For Gordon Clark)