The Duffel Bag

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up

just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get

off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup

runneth over and you breast a thickening fret

of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game

turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough

you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame

but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff

into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame,

with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff,

the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . .

So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free

to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush

in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame

from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree

of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name

in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . .

Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee

of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream

of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery—

what brought you to this and who might take the blame,

and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.