1.

Dust devils swirl on the desert floor.
Saguaro cacti raise their arms
in praise or an invisible stick-up.
No gunman looms on the horizon.

My father drives us home
from California to Kansas
in a brown '61 Chevy station wagon.
His goal: to get there as soon as possible.

My brother and I bake in the back seat.
The air-conditioning freezes over.
We roll down the windows to a stifling
wall of heat. Soon, we will cross

Death Valley, already 111 degrees
at mid-morning. I squirm and worry
that we do not have enough
gas to make it. We are the only car

on the road. Emptiness breeds around us.
My imagination peoples the void
with phantoms, characters from comic books
and drugstore Westerns. Ghosts hover over

my memory now; they hold the key
to my travels. I must invoke them again.
I hear the rumble of the American Southwest:
canyons and buttes, mountains and hoodoos.

2.

On the outskirts of the Grand Canyon,
my father searches in vain for a place to stay.
All motels teem with the smell of curry --
for him, the stench of war in Calcutta,
anathema to a young Army Seabee
stationed leagues and leagues from home.

The neon light flashing VACANCY over
the whitewashed, A-frame office
might as well say NO. We do not stop.
We sleep in the car, the four of us
restive and uncomfortable, awakened
at last by sunrise over the North Rim.

A sage-scented day has begun
under a yellow-lavender sky.
There are still miles and miles to go,
as Frost put it. But something changed
in the night. Barreling down the barren blacktop
we have already gotten there, absence our new home.