Thoroughfares

High in the Sierra the Interstate cuts
Its own course above the dry creek bed,
its swerves matching the mountain sides
only where math and matter marry to carve
the slopes I speed along, marvelling
at the mileage I make until, below,
I catch sight of a strip of buckled asphalt,
remnant of a turnpike no longer on the map.
This is how we age. Steep crests once
ground up laboriously in low gear are
blasted into empty air. One highway
replaces another. Weeds take root
in the cracks of a thoroughfare leading
nowhere. Above, traffic moves swiftly on.

*
A poem I have grown into. In 1985 on the Five near Mt Shasta on the way back up to Edmonton, I figured I had lived enough to have seen it all. Nope. There was much more to come. What I call a mute sonnet, one without rhyme. Aka, a fourteener.