By the time we got to Boring,
I had renounced predestination.
Where else would the highway take us
suffering through some distracted god’s
radio silence? Logjam of logging trucks,
exit music of gas food lodging
everywhere the same. Sorrow depends
on repetition—like this rain laboring
over the river, the river’s involute meander
flooded to the cutbank brim. Sorrow deepens
the river’s rust in bends. How do you get
this far from first snow falling in the mountains
to fever felling a rush-hour continent
without addressing the problem
of omniscience—hare that scatters
before the avalanche trigger, the blink that instant
an insect hits your eye?
You feel what’s coming before you see it:
steam rising from the radiator vent.
Rage rising from the radio like a hole in the head.
All things being equal
to nothing we can return unscathed—
that edge the road drops over the canyon
Clear Creek carves into a thousand thous-
and rivulets. I saw myself turning before I turned,
I heard someone breathing inside the volcano
the maps call Middle Sister. It took generations
of amnesia to get me through Warm Springs,
so far drifted from my reputation as
clear cut mission mine.
Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His books include Solar Prominence and the forthcoming Traverse. He serves as the executive editor of Poetry NW Editions. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Unsettling the Oregon Trail.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
