When I was a little boy in my father’s
black three-quarter ton Ford in ‘59,
moving across the Mojave at barely fifty,
every time we’d stop there among the rocks
and cactus or Joshua trees and I’d look up,
the intensity and whiteness of the light
would strike me with its contrast to the pickup’s
paint and the tar streaks oozing out
of the asphalt there along 66.
Then after I learned to read, I noticed
that very same contrast between the shade
of the paper that made up the page
and such words printed there as “We hold
these truths” or “Congress shall make no law.”
And now you tell me they don’t mean what they say?
David Stevenson
Farmington
