Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire then moving
Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,
Moving to country music the heart
Is torn a little more because the song says the truth.
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen
To people, men women, women women,
Men men, in all these things the soul is bound
To be broken somewhere along the line,
That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing
With no memory, no inkling then proceeds
Across America
In the sap green of the tropics,
Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age,
At the white impossible ice hour, starving,
Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down,
Above the nude1, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire,
Over the tiny fragile mound2 of finger bones
Of an Indian who died standing3 up,
Through the heliotrope4 of a song about the sunset,
To live the thirty-six things
never comes home.