Accountability

Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow, their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:

Denver,

Cheyenne.

Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed by the hard stars.

The school bus by the door, a yellow mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose door and worries it all night, letting the hollow students count off and break up and blow away over the frozen ground.