Lucie Brock-Broido

Real Life

Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow. 
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving 

Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard, 
Moving to country music & the heart 

Is torn a little more because the song says the truth. 
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen 

To people, men & women, women & women, 
Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound 

To be broken somewhere along the line, 
That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing 

With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds 
Across America 

In the sap green of the tropics, 
Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age, 

At the white impossible ice hour, starving, 
Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down, 

Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire, 
Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones 

Of an Indian who died standing up, 
Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset, 

To live the thirty-six things 
& never comes home.