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I
Dream a Highway
Maggie Smith
—
after Gillian Welch
The car quivers under pinpricks of starlight in western
Pennsylvania. Bare trees on the mountaintops are backlit,
iron filings tugged by a magnet. I'd blame the moon if I could
see it, blown behind the silos with chimney smoke. Lit white
as my face, the highway I dream is empty. Snow suspended
in the headlights never touches the windshield. Darkness fills
the rear-view as the road behind dissolves, no longer needed.
Ahead, our city opens its hand, and I am calling the streets
by name, a litany: Arcadia, Hudson, Neil. Tonight nothing sleeps,
not the river or the geese that belong to the river. Not the few
seed pods that survived winter. They rattle their brittle envelopes
on a tree we could touch by removing the window screen.
Even the screen is awake all night, dicing, printing a grid onto
the landscape. But when we walk outside, everything is whole.
© Maggie Smith
Maggie
Smith is the author of the poetry collections Lamp of the
Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman
Award; and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005), winner of the
2004 Pudding House National Chapbook Competiton. Her poems have appeared
in The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Florida Review,
Prairie Schooner, Swink, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf
Coast, Passages North, and other journals. She has received
two Academy of American Poets Prizes and an Individual Artist Fellowship
from the Ohio Arts Council. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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