All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Baby Blue Eyes near Oak Tree

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THE TERMINAL

The third time I passed the terminal on Cherry Street,
I recalled that I had worked there years before
on Saturdays cleaning up the trailers in the yard, painting
each back door orange and planting the company decal.

Another company had taken over the terminal, sold off
half the yard, added barbed wire to the top of the fence,
and left one trailer standing away from the dock.
Back then, on Saturdays the yard was deserted,

the sun pounding the blacktop and the metal of the trailers,
a hot breeze always causing settling sounds somewhere,
a gray fur growing everywhere, the trailers lined up
for departure to points all over the west coast, hiding me

all day from anyone who might have known me,
a land empty of illusion where a self was unnecessary.
My cousin worked with me twice. I must be an illusion
to him now, the terminal on Cherry Street forgotten,

the old company lost in a hostile takeover, its name
seen in the valley on one trailer stranded on a small farm
by the freeway. The last Saturday I worked with him
at the magical end of the summer before I began

my own glorious life, we jammed together, riffing
the songs of our youth on the empty loading dock,
smoking doobies. Who were you then? I have asked
that question too many times, not just of my cousin

and myself but of many who have disappeared
since that day, too many times not to realize that I
must be an illusion, not one self but a world,
one part earth, with the sun flowing

through plants and animals and pounding
through my veins, growing in my cells; one part
water that has flowed down the mountain slopes,
with trees and clouds mirrored in its skin as it flows;

one part air that circulates through the ocean
of breath; and one part the fire of desire--each creature
a world of earth, water, air, fire--yet my cousin
and I are the only ones who remember the fingers

on the guitar strings, the rock music
that ended years ago, the terminal
in merciless light, with someone
else there now to care for it.