The Invention of the Interstate System

begins in dirt, clumps of Queen Anne’s lace, bindweed unfurling its moons in the morning

to start somewhere to perform one’s certain act of  failure

begins as still life with foliage and road

one man with a shovel, digging one measure-full of map, a clump resting heavy on his blade

one woman in a house up the grade laboring at a washbasin, her hands pinked raw, her mind worrying some idea east to west, passing it through every state her imagination has to offer

begins with her view: blot of man in grass landscape

to throw one’s sorrow throw one’s lonely sorrow like a clod of dirt to the sky

begins with the sound of rustling, dried stalk against stalk in wind whipped up by the motion metal makes through place

and you, love, in the passenger seat with muddy boots and what’s native to your veins

the window rolled down, the hand making waves

and me admitting: I am that woman, I am that woman

make us thread and lace us let us be a vessel holding everything together

silence to silence, thwap upon thwap of fence posts gauging speed

then Briza maxima, big quaking grass rattling

a car towing a car with a hitch-line

the shock of scotch broom in a ditch giving order, yellowing the scene, 
defining margin and median

the blocks of who lives where, the borders of recognizable plots we create when we wake, we create in our wake

networked, but not in the way General Pershing displayed his blueprint 
for defense

to weave our fingers strong as rope to bond with knots something other 
than a nation

begins with the defenseless, the redlined neighborhood thought less than

the dips and curves and blinker’s blitzing through the dark

we feel in the heart, centrifugal force

and we ride: no destination, no end to the turning ego, its fuel of insecurities

to be moving and acting and weaving through space

the trace of our being here, tattooed in asphalt like the body’s Blaschko lines made visible

a pattern, a pattern manifest, the way we were made

your palm look at your palm look at all the connections you hold in your hand