The blackbirds gather,
cutting a line across the sky,
dividing it in half, marking time.
The fields are full of yellow flowers
that the rain has helped escape the plow,
but it will come for them, still,
to press their headless bodies
into the ground beneath the wheels.
Through it all, the highway runs.
It could be a road to anywhere.
Instead, it beats the path to my mother's door,
the awful cushion of the familiar.
This is the life that we lead,
on this blue globe spinning in the black,
tied down to the earth, then severed from it.