Truck Driver's Aubade Poem by Hans Ostrom

Listen: sunrise stirs bugs
in dry grass. The long
whine of a steel guitar
curves into a thin blue highway.

This peace is easy to take, I'll tell you.
We kiss, kick off covers
light as dead butterflies,
and grab each other, laughing.

Your radio drops out a three-chord,
two-minute-fifty song,
too much like other songs,
just like those tin napkin

and sugar dispensers
that look alike always alike
on sticky plastic countertops
at all them truck strops,

where I'll rest elbows,
the thick roar of sixteen
tires still in my ears. Darling,
if I chat up a waitress

while she's filling my
Thermos with coffee,
know it's only out of
habit and good manners.

You know my heart growls
like a diesel for you when
dawn spills across the hood
of the Peterbilt, and I think

ahead to gearing down on
the grade sloping into
your place here where
the creek sings out back.