Interstates

Thousands of ribboned miles and millions
Of Standard Oils ands Motel 6's merge
In patterned supernovan florescence.
The universally green signs stare from
Their forests with reflective dot deer eyes.
Glowing from desert to constellation,
At full flood in their big city deltas
Reaching fourteen lanes, narrowing to four
In mountain passes, swum down by fifty
Wheeled leviathans, these serve, like a little
Latin on one's dollars, a higher purpose.

Watch as a station wagon passes Los Almos,
And think of Rusty in wonder at the window.
The circling mirror of a well shined truck hub.
Light fading from a bulbous early TV tube.
The global visor of the moonsuit helmet
Reflecting earth in a convex facelessness.
Contra linearity: the steering wheel guillotine,
A new leading cause of death in the young.
Post-, post-, post-, tick by to alert sleepy drivers
They're on grass. A whole car crash profession
For insurance corps., with highway engineers
Who speak national codes of orange Bott's Dots,
Dark urine trails in a rear view. Forty-five thousand
Speed-limited miles of troop transport to take
Out parachuting Russians. Here for the interstellar
US these latinate poetic exaggerations provide
A testing ground for an American Mars.

Try twenty hours on one of these tributes
To endless capital turned concrete
And think of all the sheer liquidity
Bypassed and bridged by epic catalogues
Of cars and towns. In the fast lane, can't you see,
It's Walt Whitman in a Winnebago,
Taking in the twelve level LA flowers
Of intersections and overpasses
The figure-eights, the pillars, traffic jams,
All seen from channels two to twelve in the sky,
The helicopters to live-moralize
The chases, the lunatics setting themselves
On fire by the roadside. The highway
Patrolmen and their motorcycles shine
In mirrored glasses. At the end of thousand
Mile aqueducts we can all see who built
The biggest bridges tunnels and arches ever,
Light shining on the galactic golden ones.

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