89A

Long day on the road and missing our exit
at a roundabout south of Flagstaff puts us on 
the slower of two routes to Sedona’s hallowed 
stacks of rust-red rock. In the rented black sedan,
it’s me at the wheel, with Katie at my side and
the boys in back. Should we turn back, we ask,
to expedite our trip, but why rush for no reason,
and isn’t the forest all around us so marvelously
green in cloud-tempered afternoon light.

Traffic stalls; the slower route, suddenly slower.
We sit, several cars deep behind a lowered
mechanical arm, near the base of a downhill, hairpin
turn; the arm I, from the driver’s side, can only just
spy through dense manzanita. On public radio,
a local poet speaks of celestial asterisks, and Katie
suspects a second arm, up ahead, on the other side
of the road, lowered, for the northbound lane
remains clear.

Blockade, or blockage. One of the two.
Either way, there was a homegrown band whose
ugly bumper stickers once covered the lockers
and railings of my high school campus, wasp
yellow and black.

At the bottom of a bin relegated to our garage,
my sons and I find a pair of these stickers, unused.

The older boy, inheritor of my tendency to
relic-hoard, wants one for himself.

Rigid and ruddy, as sandstone: his will against
my reluctance to break up the past.

We wait for lowered arms to lift.