Her tapered tail a letter opener,
the spry anole darts across the dirt
that’s just been dug, a desert connoisseur
of things too small for me to see. Alert
to shifting changes, stopping only to
gulp-swallow, she’s a busy bugger. How
she scurries across sidewalks and skidoos
up walls like Spiderman on speed. I vow
to follow her lightning course, her zig-zig
transit among the rocks—but can’t. She’s gone.
There’s more adventure, other lives to snag,
while I’m left musing at her goings-on,
the endless busyness, the empty hole
that I have dug and patiently console.
                        

Years later the place would be known
for the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard,
but when I entered Laramie County,
I knew it only as a place to stop for the night.
Leaving Michigan that morning, I drove west
all day, San Jose my ultimate destination.
There was no Silicon Valley, the tech boom
had not yet arrived, nor had personal computers.

Just past the Nebraska state line, I pulled off
into tiny Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, checked into
the only motel and walked to the lone diner,
where I wolfed down a burger with bottomless
coffee. Energy drinks had not yet been created,
nor had Starbucks spread across the country.
Everyone there wore a cowboy hat and boots,
even the waitress. Everyone had their eyes
on me, as if I’d just arrived in a hippie van,
long hair strewn with flowers down my back,
infesting the values of America’s heartland.
I would have high-tailed it out of there had I not 
been road-weary and exhausted. Still, the unease . . . 

Yet when my California dream went bust,
I stopped at the same diner on my long drive
back home. Same cowboys, same waitress,
same dead flies on the same greasy windowsill,
same old dust cleaving to my shoes as I left.