Road Trip#4: Rapid City

It’s 3:00 am EST and I’m sitting in a hotel in Rapid City

I wonder where my heart would register

If it could be tracked like postage.

Today I sped up and over dunes of dried grass

In an ocean of gray cement and black bits of tire –

I met a man in Wall who gave me a free map and pointed me west.

I moved on and watched the cows lo and cluster close together

Small squares of field were bright green still, even in November

And I watched a cow ease the dividing line into crunchy, yellowing corn stalks.

I stood tiny before Washington’s twenty-foot nose today

And wept at the immensity, and wept at Borglum’s immense dream.

I wandered the ponderosa pines, touched pinecones, watered the ground along the trail.

Hotels are like dorms, but the adult version.

I can feel people sleeping around me, although there are no sounds to tell me so.

There is unity in displacement, and I believe many people here feel lonely in it, too.

I want to shout and hear echo through the hills

It’s good to be lonely, it’s good to be alone, we are all so powerless, and God knows!

Instead I crank the radio to Beast of Burden and drive on through the night.