In the night’s quiet, the long-drawn hum of the freeway a good mile off, I’m still the beginner I was when I first stood in this room and heard the road’s come-and-go song through the open window, words in an unlearned tongue, lost on me like talk on a newborn. But the lyrics must be all about us—those groaned sonorants and growled bassos, whistles, hisses and harsh stops crossing the dark. Yes, those are our wheels peeling the blue sustains from that fat stone string stretching the length of the city’s backbone, our urges pumping the pedals, pressing fumes out the pipes’ mouths. As a man weaves home from his drinks and hapless flirts, his radials lift a refrain behind him off the cement. Another man grits his teeth, guns it, left lane a gauntlet of noble-gas-lit regrets, and his speed raises a throaty question for whoever might listen. I hear it, but who can translate? It’s a mineral language, from inside us but strange. Under a span a tent-dweller turns and turns to his tall arbor’s drones. His lungs and liver absorb and emanate ancient complaints. And words we can’t pronounce toss past my ears unparsed, lost like a radio host’s in the spit of a solar flare. Barbarous music, though it’s softer from here, a drift from those gears and pistons driven by souls strapped in their hulls, low howls out of hot-breath’d flutes rattling the jumpers and spares. We never say or sing for ourselves what we do, our speech like the whine and sputter our engines make while we motor we don’t know where, no reverse . . . Mom and Dad downstairs, my gods dividing my world, sharp words dulled by the tumble up through the air. Give it years—our own kids tucked in, keys in my grip, I’m out the door, whatever’s been said. Trouble lies in a gut rumble, a crankcase churn, a winding in the spine to propel this human machine toward nothing in mind. I can still feel my hands on the wheel, between the lane’s glowing dashes, keeping it 5 to 10 over the limit, the bebop turned up to a clarion blare in the steady crash of wind through the windows wide open, when I was among the night song’s writers, one of the lost mad men hurtling clueless no closer to love, burning a roared prayer up and down the interstate through town again, no hint what the words were even then.