Reflections By The Bay

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Blind Curse

You could drive blind

for those two seconds

and they would be forever.

I think that as a diesel truck

passes us eight miles east of Mission.

Churning through the storm, heedless

of the hill sliding away.

There isn’t much use to curse but I do.

Words fly away, tumbling invisibly

toward the unseen point where

the prairie and sky meet.

The road is like that in those seconds,

nothing but the blind white side

of creation.

You’re there somewhere,

a tiny struggling cell.

You just might be significant

but you might not be anything.

Forever is a space of split time

from which to recover after the mass passes.

My curse flies out there somewhere,

and then I send my prayer into the wake

of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls

one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.

“Blind Curse”

from After and Before

the Lightning (Tucson:

The University of

Arizona Press, 1994).