Three days we would drive before we hit the shore.
Empty hotel rooms and gas pumps would blur by.
At night on the road, while he lay in the back seat
mapping intergalactic travel through my rear window,
I would light up a spark behind the wheel
and cover the ceiling with eddies of dense smoke.
We’d drive fast!
Out onto the water.
Chasing the moon over the horizon
never stopping to let the sun catch up.
Using some sort of concept he had derived
from an extraterrestrial theory,
we would keep our tires skimming the surface.
We would drive four days!
Hailing down the occasional cruise ship or oil tanker, paying them
double or triple the price to fill ‘er up.
At some point we would stall,
empty tank
in the middle of the ocean,
no where in the world.
I would suggest that we take a swim to
stretch our legs.
He would suggest that we take off our clothes.
There’s no law out here, natural or instituted.
No one to chase us down for indecent exposure
or defying the properties of water.
We would climb out the window and dive off the roof.
Then standing up, our vertebrae all aligned,
we would flatten our souls out on the surface.
I would stand there for a moment
and then crouch down, tense up my calves, and leap off the surface;
arrow into the silent water.
Later I would lay stretched out on the hood
burning in the moonlight,
blinded by the stars that were invisible from land.
While he rigged up a contraption to distill salt water
for drinking and pouring into our radiator.
“Will the moon light make it work,” I would ask.
“Only this once,” he would say.