No Way to Run – Photo and Poem.

No Way to Run –

It happens, when your truck

strands you along some

dirt track. Even after

it quits, as it rolls to a stop

you sway fore and aft

as if to use the lever

of your body to force

the truck another foot. But what’s

another foot among the yellowed

foothills of dried grass punctuated

with poles and pump-jacks?

You walk out the way you came.

You walk through a hot breeze

that carries the raven’s caw

and the hawks shriek as they

fight under the thin clouds.

You hope for a ride as much

you need a drink of water – a passing

roughneck or a cowboy or someone

who can get you all the way home.

The place you’d been driving away from

before everything broke down.

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