Fourth Day in America....

....and by that sound, the horn of the trucks of America, we are haunted. It is the loneliest lost ship you ever heard crying into the deepest doomed fog as it steers towards the hungry killer rocks ahead: It is a mating call; the sound that comes from your heart into your throat when you fall in love: It is the howl of Jerry Lee Lewis, leg on the piano, at his very best: It is the fading sound of traveling far; the countdown to blast-off for all those astronauts hovering in flames above their star-aimed launch pads, their scribbled (at least in their thoughts) last notes of love (or hopes of love) poised in that longest of all un-breathings; that less-than-a-measurable-time's illumination that waits for us all between dreaming and death.

Then, in the daytime, in a cluster of music shops between the dark entrance of an auto re-spray yard and a diner with a sign saying, 'Eat here or we'll both starve," a man, body and mind (but not soul) wrecked by years of Rock and Roll, told us of a Biker's Roadhouse where we could sing and maybe even read poetry (though he doubted the poetry would survive there without drums).

We found the place. And Andy sang backed by a huge man who appeared out of the shadows and pointed at Andy's neck brace harmonica and said, "You'll not be needing that...." and played harmonica to Andy's songs with that glorious threat of harm within the harmony that is the Blues: Death in a wedding dress. And they got a big cheer and stamping of booted feet and so did I for two poems, though most people said later they'd not understood a word I'd read.

And behind us a thin beautiful nervous girl like an uncertain child took on man after man at pool and destroyed even their last smallest hopes of skill and glory.

Or maybe it was okay: Like meeting an Angel is bound to be painful but somehow worth the suffering and diminishment.

Though I find it impossible in any logic of anything at all to explain why I think this might be true.

But I do.