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She strains at the leash, Trying to turn the corner. “Not that way,” I say. But Ella insists, So I give in and follow. Not that big a deal. This short, narrow lane, It’s a valid path back home, Not such a detour. Along the sidewalk We rush, my arm stretched out straight, Not pausing to sniff. She stops at the porch, Looks at the door, looks at me, Not old now but young. We were gone six years, Back now in the neighborhood Not even six weeks. I wish we could knock, But our friends are not at home, Not now, not for years. They fled this city Even sooner than we did, Not fond of Gotham But fond of our dog, Who wags on their former stoop, Not fenced in by time.

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Between me, safe in my seat on this bus, And the decadent majesty of the salmon-red cliffs of eastern Utah, A ghost landscape stands sentinel, As if etched into the glass by a cadre of capering goblins. The residue of a hasty window washing-- Loops and whorls of dirt left untouched, uncleansed, Unrepentent, at the bottom of the glass on each fluid upstroke-- It sparkles, gritty and salt-sharp in the oblique sunlight, Like a series of pearly solar flares, Or a graph of the desert’s pulsebeat, Or spectral negatives of a washed-out sandstone arch, Photographed in stages over eons of time-- Snapshots from a child-god’s flip-book-- Frothing, leaping, peaking, then falling back into the ground Like fountains of earth, A time-lapse planetary signature That will melt and return to dust With the next unlikely rain.

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I-80 Wyoming night time snowstorm eastern slope Continental Divide 15-foot U-Haul truck 50 to 60 miles per hour girlfriend white-knuckled behind the big wheel swerving skidding on the downhill ice all our possessions rocking in back not quite overbalanced I pump my passenger brake of course to no effect snowflakes like hyperspatial streaks in the headlight beams I gently suggest slowing down or even pulling over to let me drive instead but not gently enough I’m an excellent driver she insists you should have seen that time I spun out in Texas and I didn’t even run off the road but I grew up driving in snow I tell her and you didn’t you have to slow down it’s the wrong thing to say and we

William Shunn Road Trip, page 2, continue stanza fishtail again one moment of terror in the long, slow slide from west coast to east coast one harrowing strobe-lit frame from the superslow-motion accident that is us

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It’s getting harder these days to tell the crazy people from the sane, what with technology the way it is. It used to be that talking to yourself in public was a sure sign of instability, like wearing a sign that said, “Steer clear of me, I’m not quite right, I might be dangerous, if only to myself.” But now we all do it, carry with us an invisible chorus of voices in a magic Bluetooth cloud, insistent, demanding voices clamoring for attention, screening out the real world around us, making us each more dangerous than twenty actual crazy people, a more present threat to public safety than any potential suicide bomber. Or at least more annoying. Thorazine does nothing at all to fix it. The implications of eye contact have changed too. It used to be that when someone looked at you when they spoke, it meant they were talking to you. Not anymore. This morning as I was walking the dog, I heard the rasp of a window being shoved open, and a shrill voice saying, “I told you last time what was going to happen.” I looked up to see a head and shoulders push out a fourth-floor window, and the person was looking right at me. “What?” I called up, thinking that Ella and I had been mistaken for someone else, maybe someone who hadn’t cleaned up after a mess on the sidewalk. “Oh, I’m on the phone,” said the smiling head, pointing to its ear, and carried on talking in the same tone of voice, as if both conversations were one. And maybe they were. I still don’t know.