pieces of moses

and cookie crumbs -both oreo and chocolate chip, and wrinkled diner receipts, and the wrapper from greg's secret affair with beef jerky, and the soggy toothbrush that disappeared the first morning, and a plastic spoon with peanut butter dried around the edges, and a cracked stick of insence smelling a bit too strongly of fruit and flowers and venice beach, and the rainbow of dirt from the frozen dawn in the New Mexico mining town or from the golden afternoon in Tennessee searching for a cemetery or from the twenty other states when we, with or without winter coats, sometimes hatted and scarved, sometimes light and thin in our t-shirts, brought pieces of America into the car, trecked it in on the bottom of our boots. It all disappears into the vacume hose or trash bag.

Now my car feels cavernous. I'm parked in front of my parents' house. Five thousand four hundred and twenty two miles later. Back where I started. My sigh doesn't echo, but it could.