I was busted by police for dreaming 77 m.p.h.
in West Texas about aerosol cheese and the
dog with one wooden leg. My origin: a trailer
park lit by artificial Christmas trees. The smell of old
women not smiling. Dusk music. Peapod love affairs
and short-wave suicides. If I look into the photos hard
enough, there's a geranium sadness, something grinding
away. Razors of last night's sons, butane, and
teenage trousers. Ice snapping in a gravy of Southern
Comfort, blisters, and diesel engines.

The boy scout compass points towards
brick schools absorbed by dress codes
and measuring jars of science. But on my
tongue there's steppes, huts, and anteaters.
I am waiting to open up the tree of your
intelligence and find the hidden pencils.

The wisdom of the heart lies in unlocking your body.
Put down the germs and guns, put down
the video nights. Look into me here, in these photos,
grip down. Peel back the corners of sons and lovers.
Awaken between the pause of FM radios. Daydream
in the Wal-mart print of a sunset.
You who are better than saccharine and alcohol. Your lean kisses
and small town feet are mercilessly rooted. Can we bridge
the gap between kitchens and laughter? Walk the room
with the tinfoil antenna and warm vapor?

Jesus makes jack a dull boy,
but one man's meat deserves another.
That's what you made me
write in 1974.

Could you make flannel from these photos?
Sprinkle them on highways like salt in upstate New York?
Do these photos replace psychiatrists?
Do they tie up the universe in a fiber optic blink?
Do they turn red and brown like seaweed?
Hold Snickers and mermaids?
Hold lingering men in short sleeves down gravel streets
in the butt-end of days?

Sawdust, not oysters.
Sunburns, not well-turned phrases. Bulldozers
edging up against locust nights. Thinning hair,
not neckties.

If I could reach into the muted color of these photos,
and erase it like a blanket closing down on us, I would.
I'd rename the slow altering Kodachrome after 30 years,
even if our arteries cling to the details. The photos flank
our memories, like little wrecks in which our names appear.
Where's the hot, loosely bound summer afternoons —
the loaded camera?

I do not believe in absence and resolution,
only the flicker of the freewill caught in these photos
that drove out my family into the selenium gray of Illinois.