Road On the Earth

A Road On the Earth

Once you were lost in a foreign city, every face was strange. You were coming or going with money in your pockets, shouldering your way through a crowded street, intent on not letting anyone catch your eye. And then -

you took a bus, a taxi, you held out your clean thumb: that harsh world fell away. You watched the empty plains and waiting hills drift by, the skinned carcass of a cow and an old woman selling sweetbread on the roadside: a face etched in leather only a thousand years could tan, eyes that could send sinners back to their mothers. There was a blind man with a three-stringed guitar and upturned hat, dull coins, a voice like broken pottery that yet still held a tune, a song of empty dirt-floor rooms and biblical love affairs. Houses, green or blue or pink, and the tilled earth and a girl standing at the clothesline in the evening sun just looking and breathing and passing through: a word. A burro standing chained to a brick wall that ran on toward the horizon ofbumt hills and big sky before it crumpled into a pile of rocks like the still picture oftime moving. Beside you on the bus a young woman sang barely through her sweet, decay-scented mouth

to her child held to her breast and soon you were asleep.