Craters of the Moon. 82 mph

One theory holds that life is a mirage of ruin,
where the ship we wave to, to save our drowning,
is a reflection of light and heat and vapor,
where the branch we cling to, to keep our sinking
necks above the quicksand, is only an unrooted stick,
ungrounded in anything solid. For instance, take us,
the three men here, upon the Craters of the Moon
National Monument, beyond the nuclear waste sites,
beyond the potato fields leafing green upon the lava
basin, beyond the archeological digs of Paleolithic
horses, elephants, and cats. The snow flurries
about us this April. The snow falls on our shoulders,
into our faces, and we laugh because we do not
know how we arrived, except at a speed of 82 mph,
too slow to escape any ruinous memory, too slow
to outrun the teen-aged girls of our youth who caught
hell from their fathers for us, caught in the tangle
of legs and language that spoke of escape routes
out of deserts worse than any Idaho. Where are we,
these three men, driving to? Who is to say how far
into a world we would go where there is such dying,
such laughing, into a world of so much cinder and
smoke? Who is to say we will not return because
we cannot drive any better but to wreck headlong
into a brick wall that will evaporate at the very last
second? It is not the mirage that worries us. What
are we? Okay, I will tell you. We are three men caught
in wind and time, caught in the piss and creak
of middle age, caught in everything just before
our eyes. We have the nerve to reach toward any branch
and death-grip the limb, knowing nothing is there.
Or rather, we place a hand on the warm, broad
back of our fellow, and what disappears is all
the driving that got us here in the first place.

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