The Old Writer

That night, he wrote five sentences.
He wrote about his mother’s hands
caressing his face when he had pneumonia as a child,
and he wrote about his baby daughter’s fingers
clutching his thumb the day he returned from the war.
He put his pen down, yawned, went in the kitchen
for a few sips of hot tea, and he thought about changing
the last word—eternity—in his fifth sentence,
then decided against it. When he had enough tea,
he went to bed and he died in his sleep.
Early the next morning,
before the time he’d regularly awaken,
his wife—as she often did—snuck a look
at the latest writing, and she smiled.
A while later, realizing he was sleeping
longer than usual, she returned to his desk,
lifted the sheet of paper to her lips
and kissed his final words for the first time.

Hitchhiking, 1969

When she stopped her ’65 Mustang convertible,
I was lonely and stoned under dusk’s Navajo red sky
just outside Thoreau, New Mexico, and she said,
I have no home, I am driving for eternity
and you can ride along forever if you wish.
“I just need to get to El Paso,” I replied,
noticing the length and contour of her legs
stretching from her miniskirt
like a long and passionate song into her sandals.
My name is Intertropical Convergence Zone,
she said as I climbed in, and I am low-pressure atmosphere
that might take us there someday.
“I’m Steve,” I said, “and I’m trying to be a writer,
kind of like Richard Brautigan, in case you’ve heard of him.”
    
She didn’t respond, but later around Las Cruces,
she asked me what I’d say to Trout Fishing in America
if I ever met him, and this time I didn’t respond,
as I was too busy listening to her legs.
You will write a poem someday that pulls air
from the equator, with words from deep in your lungs,
she said when she dropped me off
at the plaza in downtown El Paso,
and I took a deep breath of her as she drove away.