C Songtext
von La Dispute

Scene From a Highway in the Desert, 1989
First draft

I let the car drift some
Eye your uncomfortable pose and profile
The postures of long drives
Shifting numb and sore parts when you can no longer sit them
Foot on the dash
Foot on the dash
X hours or so from some somewhere now
Only half-aware when I change lanes half-accidentally
Vision fixed in the distance
Identifying wildflowers

Then I almost touch your leg but something stays me
The economy of love in close quarters
A learned thing
A contrast I have marked quietly alone
Of the small rented spaces we′ve slept in
In tents even sometimes
In this tiny capsule


But hurtling uncertain to the unfurling forever of here

Which it does to me, the desert
Has effects
Makes me mark things needlessly
The immensity and breadth of it all, I guess
Overamplifying
Overconnecting
Makes me see all small simplicities significant and substantial
Makes me seek out symbolism
Search in symmetry for some lost statements of the
Self in these words that hiss or make snake sounds

But it feels holy almost
Though I don't say so
A native sense but not skeletons in headdresses
No projections found in thunderclouds shaped by soundless lightning
It is an extra sense
Pentecostal thing
Unnameable and great
An immortal unknowing
Sacred and ancestral and real and only felt here when the sun falls


Only felt here and now with the otherworldly haunts of coming dusk
Descending from immeasurable spaces to more immeasurable spaces
An ancient endless desert sprawl
Anarchic
And forever
Interrupted only by this highway running west
Some wound maybe, or a bandage
Depending on how you look at it
Or maybe just what must marry the two vast expanses

A mirror reflecting both sides, our path more than anything
And who cares what
A bridge through looped history in a
Place where your watch doesn′t work
A guide through wider spaces of a magnitude unclaimed except
In concrete to the place we might claim one day, someday
You and I, for us
When we get to wherever it is we are going

And you speak one flower name aloud
Single landmark out
Immemorial now
And the landscape that always passes but never passes does find me
And we see time again
Remember the mirror pointing backwards
All of a sudden watching the paintbrush shrinking in the last light

And then I think again to touch your leg but something stays me
Some voice
Yours and mine
Combined and the rain comes saying quiet
First and then just sit

So I crack my window just so
Almost close my eyes and almost let go of the steering wheel but don't