From Chicago to Mill Spring, North Carolina

The last thing I see, Tennessee swelling into foothills, 

starlings like a sigh of smoke pluming over the road.

I barrel into bitumen-black, night thick as

asphalt, the soot smudge of trees in bluster.

What I can’t see: Blue Ridge Mountains, 

the purpled silhouettes of their recession, 

nor the flood-damped ruin of Asheville, 

rat snake road curling into forest where 

at last the car lapses into silence and I stumble 

sightless into November's keening wind. 

Once, I read of a dog ejected from a car crash, found 

days later blithely herding sheep on a nearby farm, 

and I wondered what blunt force, what rupture of metal 

on metal could hurl me through the breach into

a new life where I might shake loose the wreckage 

of grief and settle so easily into my purpose. 

Forget the city’s ragged rise of buildings, 

the refuse of memories that won’t sweep clean. 

I wake this morning to the last red gasp of

autumn, green gloss of rhododendrons, 

creek like a spill of mica silvering the rocks. 

I can't account for how I got here, hurtling

through the fathomless dark, but should you find me 

beneath a fringe of broom moss, sunk deep 

in the surge of brisk and burnished water, 

don’t return me to the sorrow from which I‘ve come.