Somehow we are always back
on it, though always
it appears to be going a different way—
here, east west; there, north south;
anyway the wrong way—
and there is nothing much to see,
mainly the scrawny late-growth woods
that famously cover up the abandoned farmsteads
and well-forgotten setbacks of
earlier passersby, our ancestors, or we halt
at the granite crown of a hill
as worn down as an old tooth
affording a glimpse of another road
(it must be the very one we want,
the one that goes to the place where we are going,
if only—if only!—we could get there, we laugh)
and the gas station nestled in the valley below.
Old potholed manufacturing towns,
weed trees, sagging row houses, Irish bars:
it is all very familiar
and everywhere much the same
here on the road through history to where
history ran out
with us alone on it, it appears, and though we are
quite lost we admit now, we are barreling along
happily enough in silence when again
that sign crops up, Route 202, the same,
my mind wandering as it does to wonder
at the two identical twos facing each other
across the empty space of the zero, just like
a mirror, I think. And oh yes, it is our road after all.
—for Jill