You’ll never know why you’re here but,
you’ll take the wheel from your brother
West of Salt Lake anyway.
The night is dark as road out here save
where the sun is rolling pink over rain-washed
streets of the town you used to call home.
Know that you’ll stop in Elko tonight.
Two climbs up
a sage and snow-dusted hill
there is a bunk for you at the Rodeway Inn.
Know the beers
you bought in Wells
will be cold after the old casino lights
put out the stars that you follow
all the way to sleep.
Tomorrow waits: across rivers you can remember
West of Reno—pine-beached Truckee,
cragged-up Yuba, and plain floating Sacramento.
Tomorrow waits under aspen limbs drooping in heavy
snow, and between old mining towns kept where no one
would think to look for gold or felled forest.
West of Salt Lake travelers park their caravans on the saltire.
They’ve come to pick stones out of the Flats,
as is custom, they leave language as prayers
for peace and loved ones in the salt,
spelling out with pebbles: Julie, Johann, John.
The alchemists of belonging are: image, language, and land,
disappearing poets and earth mark the path that calls you home.
You belong to these miles of land beneath clouds
that drag over the Salt Lake the way sheets
get caught up in a wind.
You belong under the sky just blue
enough in December sunrise to be new to you again—
those quiet rays of hope coming out to go with you
down the road.
—Stephen Batchelder ’15