Radio Girl

Driving the Natchez Trace, I tune the radio
to sixteen ten AM for Parkway info. It’s cold
out, but the girl’s voice is sticky as swamp
as she describes four hundred miles of sunken footpaths,
Indian mounds, and lush Southern scenery. This dotted
line goes all the way to Nashville. I consider going,
gassing up, and driving north. Maybe the radio girl
will be waiting in Nashville, maybe she’s lonely
and drunk, scanning her Silvertone radio
for someone like her, someone trying to describe
this much road in these few words, the December
cold creeping calmly through her doors,
past her sweater to her Tennessee bones,
where we can both brace ourselves for the weather
to turn itself warm, for the leaves to bud
their insistence back onto the windswept trees.