number 24

food & thought
There's always so much food on chinese buffets, and never enough, and tonight the black peppered shrimp nearly sent me to the other side, but it didn't quite, and we cracked our cookies and shared our fortunes, my good friends, there, through the mountain pass and tunnels in a place called Jefferson City, and they drove me to the best chinese around, my mind and me trailing thoughts of the valley I'd just driven through, all the violence and power and cracked, sliding weight of all that stone up the shear sides of those walls, hemming in my way and the last of the afternoon's light, we ate and we laughed and it was good.

Mountain Pass
I wound through the broken rocks
where men cut us a thin road
to see you friends, break our bread.