Corrie Lynn White
Elegy for Driving Around
I take a tech job in trucking,
calculate “dwell time,”
the minutes truck drivers
sit with idling engines.
My boss tracks people
tracking packages at home
or wandering Walmart aisles
for seaweed extract
or colostrum supplements,
because no one wants
to be dead in the future.
Truck driving looks
a lot like freedom,
but oil resources are finite
and folks sit on the couch to shop,
so cameras are installed
to track productivity.
As a teen, I drove my Saturn
down the cornfield’s asphalt seam.
Burning tobacco in my fingers
I breathed alongside cut
Bermuda and exhaust.
I hoped God didn’t see
how much I loved leaving.
Here kept changing.
It was a place and it wasn’t.
I could file my life into folders,
and the wind would swirl them
or the combustion engine
would burn them or the ditches
would gather them as thistle.