Summer in Exile

There is a sound
that’s as old as the oldest stream
rushing from the black forest
at the beginning of time.

A sound that wanders with you
when you drive across the country
with the top down.

When you wander
from one place to the next
as a drifter.

With no home except
for what echoes in your ears in the wind.

The drone of the tires on cement
and how the light flickers
through the trees of the roadsides in their haste.

Another town that speeds by in immobility.
Stopping when you decide to stop
lying on your back on a made motel room bed.

With the summer thick outside
and the crickets restless
in endless yellow fields extending out.

It is the sound of their restlessness
and the yellowness of the fields
painted on the walls of your dark mind.

The farmlands sprawled out absent mindedly in the heat
under the pale blue blankness of summer sky.

And the air conditioning pumps and the street noise
and the TV mumbling about the weather in the next room.

It is the sound of yourself in a foreign place
as a stranger to all landscapes
in all of their vague familiarity.

An anonymous walk through a dried up town,
an endless journey, the hum of the planet
and your body in a wilderness of street lamp.

This is the sound of summer, of the day itself,
of you in it.