Atlanta to Salt Lake

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(for Sally) 

Prose will not capture some people, the way 
they drift. You can only see them dragging 
their furniture through Wyoming night, 
down a dark throat of road, the ice 
clear and slick. We stopped to sleep in a solitary
town: Rawlins, Wyoming. Ahead: 

a slow hundred miles of snow. (Things ahead 
are always murky, but we go anyway, 
forward.) Oklahoma was first, the solitary 
landscape scarred with arthritic trees, as if dragged
up by their bones. We stopped only twice, 
once at a motel with “crap” on the walls, and all night 

she couldn’t sleep, fearing what other nights 
(“hookers and pimps”) had left in the sheets. And still ahead
of us, Nebraska flats and the Wyoming ice 
a vast white cliché. It wasn’t the way 
I expected, but an easier slope for dragging 
that U-haul than I-25. Just solitary. 

Only a semi every few miles. We played laptop solitaire
by turns—her black skirt in the window shading her like night,
blocking the sun, while my toes went numb—dragging
the load away from failed relationships, hoping ahead
for clarity, like Thelma and Louise. But that’s not the way
it works. Still, we ate at that truck stop the night before. Ice 

shrapneled our faces; her dad phoned to warn us of icy
roads that could lead to cliffs and a solitary 
death where our car might “blow up. That would suck.” His way
of cheering her up—and it worked. That night 
we laughed through the rattlesnake backscratchers, Dead Head
T-shirts, Jesus figures, stuffed pigs dressed in camo, dragging 

ourselves to warm beds in a decent motel. Then that dragging
day through whitewash, WY, horizons of ice, 
to Rock Springs, shouts, and a Pizza Hut buffet. Ahead
was Utah, final destination for her solitary 
path without men, though every night 
she would think of the same one. But that’s the way 

it works—in circles. The way she came dragging 
back home, still obscured by night, months later, the ice
still thick inside. More solitary. Less looking ahead.