This poem is called "Little America."
In Wyoming, just west of Peru, there's
a place called Little America.
No one lives there, but there's a Holiday Inn, an oil refinery,
and the largest gas station west of the Mississippi.
In winter, snow-blind truckers stop there
for coffee and diesel.
They might say a few words about the weather
or the price of oil, who knows what they might say.
But they'll snap down quarters on the counter,
stretch into their coats, climb back into the high cabs,
switch on the radio, and ride that rhythm
of guitars and lonely women into the heavy heart of the country.
On summer nights, when the sky is
a thicket of stars and the wind is cool,
jackrabbits are drawn to the warmth of asphalt.
They sit on their haunches and listen to the strange rumbling
of the stars.
They stand transfixed by beams of powerful light.
When the sun comes up, the traveler heading east or west
past Little America sees the highway
littered with their torn bodies, tufts of fur
the color of dry wheat ruffled by wind.
And further on the mesa, past barbed wire and the skeleton
of a billboard, in the long grass where antelopes sleep,
a rusted yellow panel truck stopped still
against the clear sky of Wyoming,
where years ago someone slammed the door
and walked away with nothing but his father's name,
leaving this emblem of something missing, this wind that
lays down the grass.
[APPLAUSE]