Monday, January 4, 2016

daniel
















We rode in your beater,
- that old, gold Taurus -
all over the suburbs,
through subdivisions and past strip malls,
over rail road tracks and around Little League fields.
Because that's what you do when you're 16 in San Antonio.
Besides,
we were just getting into Bowie,
and music sounds better over blown-out car speakers
and accompanied by the static hum 
of an MP3 player-to-cassette device.
But yours was broken.
So as you drove I finessed the tuner knob,
sliding up and down the AM dial,
scouring the South Texas air for something not country.
We bounced from melodic fuzz
to
conservative talk
to
more country
to
some Tejano that sounds like its waves are barely making it to us
to
something we couldn't describe but we left it there,
afraid that by driving we'd outrun the transmission,
but we didn't.

I don't remember how, but that night back at your house
we Googled what we heard.
(How do you Google a sound?)
We'd been listening to Saturn's rings,
or their magnetic something.

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