High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations:
Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance,
blinking smaller then vanishing.
The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted,
this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection,
their outer limits disappearing into darkness.
While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed,
I reassess an idea forsaken:
Why has black tar and asphalt converged, interloping?
Is the bus to Common Sense merely held up by design?
Or is the schedule less perpetual than I’d hoped?
I can’t bear these many roads, let alone travel all.
I guess I’ll wait it out, hoping such a bus might while by
to deliver me from this clusterfuck
and back toward a path less bedeviled.
An old dirt road not yet paved over, not yet overwhelming
the beating heart of a once agrestal wood.
after Robert Frost
Image credit: Scott Grant, Wolf Crossing triptych, 2017.
www.justthings.co.uk
Part of The Learned Pig’s Wolf Crossing editorial season, spring/summer 2017.
