NEWLY IN LOVE

God has so carefully
washed the sky violet
tonight, the cut down
corn stalks still stick up
a sharp ochre, trees
a fine black, spindly
branches without their leaves.

My wheels on the road
are a high pitched hum
past fields and gas stations
with red, orange, blue
signs glowing against
the rubbed out moon.

I know that the scale
that measures loneliness
must be at one of those gas
stations where people keep
pulling in, filling tanks, moving
on, solitary, innocuous
and I drive past afraid that the heft
of my own cannot be lessened
by the helium of new love,
afraid that the sadness I woke up,
held, then cast back down deeper
than she was sleeping
would be grotesquely illuminated
under those soft neon lights,
their whiteness humiliatingly honest.

Driving keeps the plum clouds
tumbling over themselves,
racing from having to balance
the paper-light weight of being
newly in love against the responsibility
of having been loved before.