PEARBLOSSOM HIGHWAY

 after David Hockney

Beyond the cross roads, sage scrub,
stone packed hard on hard shoulders
furred black by tyre rubber, is the strewn
necklace of the highway, lined by boulders
like beads on pale desert.

At sun up the sky litters light down
like diamonds on glass; a swathe of heat.
Furnace Creek cracked under a four-year drought.
She had followed tail lights as they snaked
from San Andreas Valley; drove east from L A.
The night still crackled circuits; owls flickered
like B-film UFOs; but none came her way.

The Cronkite News had shown highlights
of the Tet Offensive raising a casual hand
to shoot point blank: how the blood pumped
from his temples, he slowly fell and —
memory replayed in slo-mo — slumped….

A static of blue-grass guitar; a rusted truck
parked up. The road read Stop, Ahead;
the sky speckled with cloud. A patrol car sped by
windows open for cooling air, a trade-off
for not investigating. Ahead
Chuckawalla, gila, stopped in mid-sidle
scuttled off.

Her city was collapsing in on itself,
she said. It superimposed its networks,
the personal memories of lit streets,
onto the open dawn desert. Like circuits
in a silicon chip.

She was the current through both; her red car
the bead of energy, like blood, sparking
beer cans, glass, metal of a wrecked car
lit up by her passing.