Highway 67

The night sky and its pageants of ink,
its barrel fires, its immigrant stowaways,
its stars like silverware drawers
emptied into some hallway of memory,
its desire to light up the ears of the mule, the way it ties
our wrists together with baling wire, the wick of it,
its deep-dark prow, the hum of its gearbox, its salt,
the whale bones it drags through the meridian,
the way it dreams the dreams of dreams,
the way I swell like a cedar plank