Four White Lights (Two Red Ones)

Who are you talking to now to yourself
At temporary stoplights in the dark
Cold pockets of a deep river canyon?
Fatuous moonbeam, old rhetorician
Struck on the head by the horned god of verse,

You're stuck, and idling, and on your way
All at once, at once almost home and here.
This is the sort of century when cars
Like yours, propelled by fossil cunning, glide
Into the maw of black ice and rockfall

Only to slide and grumble to a halt
At the unsurprising surprise, roadwork
In the wilderness, or on the crooked
And narrow path stripped from the heart of it.
You chuckle and compose in your cocoon

Of wandering artifice, arranging
Disarticulated bones of debates
Exhumed from bogs of memories. You fail
At first to even notice what's in front
Of you and your inner desecrations

Of the ancients, under the massive walls
Compressed of yesterday. The moon is up,
Dim compared to the three construction lights
And the red stoplight eyes of the serpent,
But shines the length of icy scales and waits.