Body kept count of the roadside crosses
For a while, lonely on the long road, lonely
And prone to thinking about the last moment
Of anyone's life, the thought, perhaps, this
Is my last thought, no wait, this is, no.
No matter how many thousands of times,
Tens of thousands by now, body had drifted
Back to sleep, obliterating self and mind,
No matter how obvious it was in retrospect
Each time that awareness couldn't be there
For anyone to remember later what it was
Like to stop existing, even temporarily, no,
Body could not stop pushing thoughts close
To that event horizon from which no return.
At one point, high in a forest on approach
To Taos, the car drifted by a white cross
With a spray of small American flags
And several plastic roses, a name and dates
Inked in gothic lettering large enough to read
From the road's other side: Dale Cooley
5/10/63-5/22/09. Where were you, if you
Were, on either of those dates? On the latter,
Dale died in a traffic accident in the woods
At the age of just barely forty-six. I thought
About Dale the rest of the road to Taos,
How he died, how'd he die? I almost forgot
To mention that there was a much smaller,
Brown cross, without lettering or decoration
Right beside Dale's. The other victim? Child?
An earlier or later accident at the same spot,
As near to nowhere as paved roads get?
Maybe even another cross for Dale, placed
By someone wanting to mourn separately,
Without raising a fuss, a lover, an ex-wife.
Humans make such mysteries from the most
Common occurrences, all our sleeping,
Napping, crashing, vanishing, dying, dying.
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