Five days of driving with no voices but gas jockeys and motel clerks as the radio's accent shifts from Charleston to Albuquerque until there is only one voice in the full Arizona sun of August where the land is a rupture of raw knuckles of red abstract shapes turned by the wind's voice. Like a mother training a child, the wind has spoken, has said things over and over and the rock, like the child, has taken shape under that imperative voice. I pull off into silence, into red spindles of rock, into the company of a lizard, darting his shoelace shadow across the road and a vulture surfing the pitch of that voice that speaks as I would speak as the potter's open hands hold earth to the contour of its eloquence. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE BIRDS DO THUS by ROBERT FROST HOW THEY GO ON by JAMES GALVIN NOBODY'S LOOKIN' BUT DE OWL AND DE MOON (A NEGRO SERENADE) by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON THE BLACK MAMMY by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON STREET-CRIES: 2. THE SHIP OF EARTH by SIDNEY LANIER YOUNG LINCOLN by EDWIN MARKHAM |