Читать книгу Maps - John Freeman - Страница 8

Rocklin

I saw it being built in the bowl

of our foothills, trees disappearing

month after month replaced by smooth roads,

empty schools, chopped-up lots and cul-de-sacs,

unfinished houses, sound berms curving

roads into long cement smiles. We’d

drive there in our parents’ cars — past

starter castles — to daisy-wheel junctions,

stoplights sheathed in muslin,

swinging slowly in summer breeze,

air so tight and piney you could hear

construction hammering miles away.

A ghost town but for that sound. We’d

sit in the unfinished high school stadium, at the

lip of what became the bleachers, a half-built

multiplex in the distance, and listen to nothing

turning into something, waiting for the sky

to go purple, traffic to hush.

Then, curfew looming, we’d race back across

the newly edgeless city, radios cranked

to drown our pounding hearts, tires whining on

the silky arterials. We felt it would never end —

the empty sky, the city that didn’t matter,

holding our breath when we clicked off

the headlamps and ran through stoplights.