Other Than Me

You intrigue me, you said.

I thought, how so, how can this body be anything more than dirt.

Don't be unlike the movement you profess, you said. Or I imagined you said this, in my head.

Two hours ago, I wrote that nothing could move me but the image of you washing dishes in a road-side bar, crying for a woman, broken.

Your rhythm is the same.

Mine, I mean. My person stands up each morning, feels some kind of worried weight.

So, a man climbed Buffalo Gap with a woman who wrote lyrics on the tires of run down cars.

They thought about when their bones couldn't hold up, about the fact they never think of getting older.

And something happened when the sun refused to peak through.

Something stuck, like a piece of gravel when you walk, or a bluebonnet between a bridge on Interstate 20.

Don't read too much into the earth.

Don't settle your thoughts on the mesa. It will spit things out, like handles of whiskey from 1972, used condoms, chipped arrowheads.

Look, she's imperfectly climbing the stairs in your dreams each night. Admit something other than the fear you get, riding along the side of the highway, listening to grit getting stuck.

About you, dirt.

No one said anything the moment you woke and realized

That though one minute weighs differently than the next,

There are lovers climbing Buffalo Gap today,

As they will do tomorrow.

And so another cries, cleaning dishes at a road-side bar. He's not you, but that doesn't mean the trains don't pass through him each night.

Or that I'd banish

Anything other than myself.

I'd banish myself. Just to stand on a mesa and sing about how I'm made of dirt and bits of broken things.

What's the difference, really, between the heartache inside woman who once wrote lyrics on tires by the side of the road, the one you loved, and me?