You cross the river east south east and note
how volcanoes and irrigation define the West
and that maybe taking separate cars is not
like anything else: how you have to calculate
ahead and behind and the traffic decides
not just for you but for the one who trails,
with a pickup between, through towns where
they play eight-man football and at least half
the cheerleaders are virgins but each of their
breasts is its own little animal, and you
pay more attention to every curve, whether
she’s keeping pace and when you have to ease
a while and how, when snow begins to spit
as you twist down the Coulee, it asks that you
weigh everything twice: the dusk, the impending
miles, the trucks slow and heavy with hay:
it’s not like conversation, or marriage, or even
like making love; it is what it only is:
a late afternoon in mid-October, driving back
from Okanogan through the weathered hush.

George Perreault is a professor of education at the University of Nevada at Reno. This poem first appeared in All the Verbs for Knowing (© 2006 by George Perreault) and is reprinted by permission of Black Rock Press.