Size Writes

I always wanted to see you tiny, in a grass skirt
on the dashboard of a tractor trailer,
dancing the hula to songs by dead Hawaiians
with slack key steel guitars while I drive
all night, the run from Norfolk to Knoxville
ticking by tenth-miles and milligrams of amphetamine

I have no tractor trailer, I have no car,
I have never been to Knoxville, but you
are falling asleep in my hand while Bennie Nawahi
sings to us whatever sad truth he must sing
and outside the wind is hot, it is pregnant with rain,
and the good  honest people of Norfolk who don’t know
they are in a poem, who are perfectly blameless,
are driven into the boiling sea by lava floes

just like you don’t know that you are small
so small that if I close my fist I cannot see you