Ghost-Road

It leads to a house you will never see again,

the friend dead who lived there—the man’s son,

Claude says, the same as his ghost. There was a time

you could sit on the front porch beside him

and listen for the Model A—familiar hush

of rubber and dust, downshift, you know the sound,

the way the engine idled unseen as though waiting

to give up on you. Cedar-lined, a yearlong

fog of dust-blue berries its canopy, the road

was made too straight, uncanny, strict as

a plumb line gravity-taut, strict as a wall.

In this, you suppose you could find the what to blame:

its coming and going too much the same; you can

still hear it—the too-straight of an emptying way.