Riding in the car, left side window seat,
Texas Hill Country whizzing by,
waves of drying grass scratching along fence lines
in the hot exhaust of Autumn.
In overcast you can watch the rain’s slant,
distant and vague,
like God or the year after next year.
I think of silence
stretching across the flat plains to the horizon -
my brother beside me sleeping soundly.

I realize slowly, in a chill –
I wake up often in the same sweat –
the inconceivability of forever,
non-existence, inevitable,
like the faded grass shoulder, endlessly blurring,
humming us deathward.