Hitchhiker

Hitchhiker

I had no car, I tell them,
my family had no car,
and do not speak
of what it meant

to stand alone against
the movement of the earth--
prophet of silence, who,
despite his own desire,

must see, clairvoyant, mystified,
the whirring of the world,
not native to its orbit
nor sheltered of its sky,

until the nomad road,
tired of itself, invites
of him, the stranger,
to go as far

as someone else decides.