Driving The Spoon

DRIVING THE SPOON


On the track
that goes off-road
where the smooth-graded

shifting sand
of the travel surface
has long since become

corrugated and coruscating,
corrugation-ridged by hard-driven,
far-riven, impatient, skim-tall speed-tyres,

so much that your slow-travel there
immediately becomes a torrid endurance test
you fail - as long yet as you don't break

until you or something will do, in a slow
but continuous corrugation-fed earth tremor
of shuddering undoing

*

your conventional
even and small-tyred on-road
vehicle (at odds with it)

even where your proud wheels
rest softly on half-inflated
light truck tyres, can and will

find a far smoother path if
you have the audacity of humility,
a quixotic braw beyond any afraid-to-be-seen conceit,

to the wisdom of foolery,
to get off that proudly-wrinkled corrugated crown
and so to drive down along

and keep on in the sided track-wide
and nearly eternally sidelong
spoons of well-graded drain.

*

Though, keep
a driven watch out

for bent star-pickets
hid in the sand.


* * *
- 1995 - after the Tanami Track