one gallon,
31 miles or so the EPA
guesstimated--163,680 feet
54,560 steps if he walked

he avoided
the major "arteries"
damnable euphemisms
for interstates

for what lifeblood
did they carry and what
did one see at 110 feet a second
1.25 miles a minute

at mile 3,
he spotted a cur crossing
the asphalt, or perhaps it was a coyote;
and until mile 12 he wondered

why he wanted to know where it had
come from, rather than where it was going,
because aren't road trips about getting
somewhere?

at mile 15, he saw a farmhouse
abandoned before time--or maybe when
a feeble old man died on a sagging bed
the month after he put his wife
in the cold ground

and told his progeny if their homestead
was good enough to bring them into the world,
and for her to depart, it was fine enough
for him to do the same

at mile 21, he traversed a bridge
over Red Bluff Creek, and he knew
there wasn't a bluff within a hundred miles;
perhaps it was got its colored calling, after
a poker player named Red, known
for his bluffing

at mile 30, he had a blowout;
no, he didn't careen off the old road
into a ditch, but slowly rolled to an impotent stop
atop the only hill in 50 miles

a man in overalls with an ancient pick up
stopped and offered aid in a drawl thick enough
to slow time; together they put on the donut
from the trunk--the man wouldn't take a ten
but said take care

and our traveler decided his helper
had to have been kin to the old man
in the abandoned shack, and perhaps he had
been there in the end, watching the wheel spin
on a tick tock clock, noting the precise minute
the old man passed--to write this time
in a family bible

because that is how it should be
of all those things he would see--beasts going
nowhere, mythic rivers from everywhere, and behind
ghost painted walls, men dying, men whose  
sons would stop to render aid to strangers
and help conjure the imagined tales
infinitely available of a gallon
of fossil fuel