Return to Kansas City

Before we left the west edge of the Sandias,
an uninvited cold arrived to guard the windows
and the doors of our little apartment.
We traveled in the wake of it, its wind
persuading the tires away from the road,
under a disintegrating wing of cloud
all through enchantment lands, veering North
soon after that solitary mound, Tucumcari.
It left clammy hand-prints on the car windows
through Texas no-name towns, miles-wide corrals
of private property, empty brown expanses,
into the panhandle of Oklahoma.
The cold, dressed in exhaust from diesel engines,
a stranger of uncomfortable proximity,
accompanied us to and from the gas stations
where we stopped before the Kansas border.
On the turnpike, over flint-colored hills, quiet
the passenger remained, through the trees
carved bas-relief, beginning to array the land,
which, with a fog, with us, all bent surging toward the city.