For Paul Going 120 in Upstate New York

In Paul’s truck, I go by my middle name
or my initials. In the front seat, we take turns spitting
chewing tobacco
into a coffee thermos,
and I play with a keychain I bought him, careful
not to make too much noise.
In these seconds of sweat & silence,
I have become unfamiliar to myself. I am
no longer interested in my first name
or any other exciting misspellings of the word
love.
Every hour, on the hour,
Ghost tours pass through the streets
of our hometown,
and
I could give that ghost tour:
starting in the river,
stopping briefly at the mailbox I smashed in with a heavy rock,
and ending above Paul’s eyebrow
where he still has a scabbed-up bruise from baseball practice.
Yesterday, I brushed my finger along it,
expecting to feel the asphalt of the road
and instead felt the warm, wet
red glow of an exit sign.
In the front seat,
it seems there isn’t much of a difference
between waiting for summer and
waiting for Paul
to say something.
He closes his eyes
and tells me
the names of the trees growing
along the highway.
When he’s going 120,
the world smears by
into something I can’t label.
“That there’s a birch
and that there’s a maple
and that there’s a fir
and that there’s a pine.”
Some pleasures are small
knots I can’t undo,
and Paul is one of them
because he knows
only one
unrelenting story,
but he knows it so well,
he can tell it with his eyes
closed.