Come Ride with Me

Come Ride with Me

(“A voice crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord; make his paths straight.’” Luke 3:4)

I’ll tell you a secret from the mud bottom of Spring,
I’ll whisper the honesty of gravel where I’m scrambling,
I need a road trip,
a route 66 trip,
a Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Navajo Nation
and curio stand trip.

I need a sedan without air-conditioning and keeping each
other awake
across the long stretches, whining across the deserts,
curling up the mountains with
tires
that should have been replaced thousands of miles ago.

I want to hear your mix tape,
your stories, even though you’ve told them
to me before.
I love to hear the story, morning by morning,
and at the rest stops where we pause for two hour naps.

I know your music well and hear it for the first time
every time we travel.
I’ve memorized your sagas, down to verse and dogma
that cement them too familiar to be surprised again.

But you surprise me even though I’ve know the road since a child,
you sing along with AM radio, crying and laughing before the song
is done.
We pull in stations from Mexico and wonder why FM
was ever invented. We keep it tuned until the signal sounds
just like the tires across the inky asphalt. We turn the wheel,
we tune the knob
searching for another list of night songs to take us home.

It seems I’ve always been on the road, and now I sit
in a tight rectangle, wanting the sun to burn my face,
the wind to wake me as the white lines hypnotize me,
and feel like the first time I ever ventured out alone.

I never feared a wrong turn, never wept my failures;
always watched for the screen doors that looked
on like lemonade stands operated by children. We were
the proprietors
of a season that leaves a hat blown into the desert,
a heart that watches for midnight dwellers in the
air from afternoon until night.

Come, let us ride. The highway still needs construction,
the scenic route awaits your company. Though you have
always been with me,
I ask you

Come ride with me again.