The Road's Conclusion

For one final time, I closed Jack's book on

the auditorium floor next to the stage
     where we were waiting for Dylan.

I fled New York for Denver following the footsteps of Paradise,

not knowing the road beneath me was the original beat home.

And there I was alone in my fascination of

a newly discovered musical consciousness around me,

opened to me by my lonely quest for miles

that led me to sit at the feet of a rock and roll legend.

What was this need to be impressed?

I was caught in the illusion,

swaying to the rhythmical current of the crowd all

lost in the sounds that were alive to me for the first time,

out on those same streets,

the inner workings of a magnet that Jack surely felt too,

finding Denver a stop-over that could not be avoided in

the long list of American wonder.

We all wanted to dig this place, yet up until now,

the only digging I had known was Seamus Heaney's.

Jack taught me the confinement of that dream.

I finished his book and woke up realizing

that Bob Dylan was a real human.

4.12.05