Way Station

Over there, behind the gas station,
something is ending. Nothing uplifting
about it: a man older than his age
falls asleep and freezes sitting up
on a flat rock, all his possessions around him.

In front of the station
a family fuels up, cleans out the car,
heads out to fun and frolic.  They’ll collect presents
and memories, turn around, head home
when it’s over.

The station remains.
Journeys are its business,
endings and beginnings
and transitory stops.  The attendants
barely notice the ambulance in the field

until it’s pulling out and they wonder
what happened.  One goes out back, shrugs,
collects the apparent trash, tosses it in the barrel.
It covers the diapers and the juice packs.
When it’s full, someone on another shift

will put in a dumpster and it will be carted
to a barge, sent elsewhere to rest.  In a thousand years
an archaeologist will pull it out of the earth
and demand it answer him when he asks
who these people were who left so much behind.

Nothing is going to answer him honestly.

No one’s going to understand the significance
of these tinfoil bags entombed
with a laminated, fragmentary photo of a young man
with his arm around a Vietnamese girl
and his helmet perched devilishly on his head.

They will make up stories then
of a culture full of warrior honor,
long-term family ties and care for tradition.  The infants
in the arms of the elders. The relics
were preserved together as a map of where these people had been.