Poetry Break

Uncertain Future (M.A. Reilly. California. 2010)

Night Travel

BY ESTHER BELIN

I.

I like to travel to L.A. by myself

My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown

indigenous and immigrant haze are healing.

I travel from one pollution to another.

Being urban I return to where I came from

My mother

survives in L.A.

Now for over forty years.

I drive to L.A. in the darkness of the day

on the road before CHP

one with the dark

driving my black truck

invisible on my journey home.

The dark roads take me back to my childhood

riding in the camper of daddy’s truck headed home.

My brother, sister and I would be put to sleep in the camper

and sometime in the darkness of the day

daddy would clime into the cab with mom carrying a thermos full of coffee and some Pendleton blankets

And they would pray

before daddy started the truck

for journey mercies.

Often I’d rise from my lullaby sleep and stare into the darkness of the road

the long darkness empty of cars

Glowy from daddy’s headlights and lonesome from Hank Williams’ deep and twangy voice singing of cold nights and cheatin’ hearts.

About an hour from Flagstaff

the sun would greet us

and the harsh light would break the darkness

and we’d be hungry from travel and for being almost home.

II.

I know the darkness of the roads

endless into the glowy path before me

lit by the moon high above and the heat rising from my truck’s engine.

The humming from tires whisper mile after mile

endless alongside roadside of fields shadowy from glow.

I know the darkness of the roads

It swims through my veins

dark like my skin

and silenced like a battered wife.

I know the darkness of the roads

It floods my liver

pollutes my breath

yet I still witness the white dawning.

Esther Belin, “Night Travel” from From the Belly of My Beauty. Copyright © 1999 by Esther Belin. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.