I counted the telephone poles as fast

as the horizon could generate them.

Anything to ease the boredom: a vast

row of crosses passing along the edge

of the Kansas interstate—Spartacus

and his defeated men decorating

the Via Appia. There was a verse

my father wrote in the military:

six million miniature Jesuses

marching into the distance. As a boy,

I would sit on his lap to Angelus

as he read from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The void

is the hitch between those boxcars, he said,

connecting one brief moment to the next.