Dawn breaks over the sprawl,
above the asphalt meadows still silver with dew and emptiness,
above the cul-de-sacs coiled like sleeping rope,
above the long repeating geometry of rooftops tiled in mortgaged anticipation,
above the mega warehouses pitched along the freight corridor like the canvas tents of some forgotten army,
above the strip malls with their unlit signs, their nail salons and dollar stores and taco joints not yet open for the day,
above the nondescript office buildings randomly sprouting from the earth and seemingly designed from the back of a bored child’s math notebook,
above the concrete cloverleafs and overpasses stacked like vertebrae,
above the eight-lane braided highways already beginning to hum,
above the train yards and the cell towers and the water towers wearing high school mascots,
above the skyline rising out of the haze like an audio engineer’s soundboard mastering a hymn to ambition,
above this whole kingdom of concrete and steel and asphalt and antennae and glass that seems forever to be growing and growing and growing into the beyond,
already the nation stirs,
already the hidden engines murmur,
in brick walk-ups, in split-level subdivisions, and courtyard apartments,
all at once, garage light by garage light, a thousand kitchen windows go gold along the grid,
porch lights winking off as the sky takes over their shift,
and already the weight of hope and dread,
of inbox and payroll and memory and hunger,
is being loaded into the bloodstream
of the roads, the rails, the ramps, the overpasses, the aisles. I stand at the mouth of my own driveway, wind licking my cheeks,
key fob warm between thumb and palm,
and I soft salute a neighbor as I stand at the mouth of the driveway,
and I am in motion.

I feel the V-6 shudder like Cincinnati saddled before Appomattox,
I feel the rails hum too, like a herd of distant buffalo,
I feel the air shimmer with the breath of ten thousand fellow riders, faces up-lit by dashboards and phone screens glowing pale lilac in the half-light,
and I say this is America also,
this strange electric dawn,
this congregation of the nearly awake, the under-caffeinated, the already late.
The mother with the folded stroller,
the apprentice with his lunch in foil,
the man rehearsing a difficult sentence,
the woman deleting one,
the nurse coming off shift as she enters another day,
the analyst, the carpenter, the clerk, the coder, the janitor, the teacher, the guard, the temp,
the lovers still tasting each other while they sleep,
the lonely wrapped in playlists,
the hopeful carrying their names like sealed letters.

Sing, garage door lifting.
Sing, click of seat-belt latch.
Sing, feet shuffling with the rhythm of a band on the platform’s yellow edge.
Sing, steel stallions rolling out on sparks of gasoline and lithium.
Sing, steel serpents sliding in, doors popping wide like pages of a hymn.
Sing the lane-merge and the turnstile,
the ramp and the vestibule,
the tollbooth and the freeway,
sing the soft profanity at the red light,
sing the little apology of “‘scuse me,”
sing the stainless travel mug and the paper cup with its cheap plastic lid like a miniature steam volcano,
sing the windshield wipers ticking time,
sing the overhead speaker crackling its prophecy of delay,
sing the brake lights flowering red in the mist,
for I too would make an anthem of these,
I too would not leave the modern world unpraised merely because it is absurd.

O I catalogue the morning in all its unapologetic plenty. The suit jacket draped over the console, scented faintly of bergamot,
the windbreaker draped over a suitcase, scented faintly of tobacco,
the hoodie embroidered with a fragment of code holding a tiny replacement part created last night by the soft light of a 3D printer,
the safety vest flung over the passenger seat like a flag of practical empire. The scuffed boots powdered with drywall,
the glossy loafers,
the neon gym shoes. The car seat cradling stuffed sharks and eight-bit dragons,
the wheelchair resting like an accordion beside tired knees,
the thermos stickered with college loyalties and old bands,
the paperback with its softened spine and one line waiting inside it like a lit match. The whispered Spanish blessings,
the Midwestern drawl saying “Morning,”
the braid damp from a shower not long finished,
the beard carrying a trace of aftershave and yesterday’s weather,
the chipped nail polish tapping a rhythm against the pole. The office badge,
the union sticker,
the church ash faint on a forehead from some previous memory of repentance, The lunchbox, the laptop, the legal pad, the hard hat, the umbrella, the gym bag,
and the little private reliquaries no scanner can detect,
the grief folded into silence,
ambition tucked into the sternum,
lust hidden beneath professionalism,
old songs ready to bloom at the touch of a thumb,
old humiliations riding along unpaid and undismissed,
old visions of the self, bronzed and galloping, not yet surrendered.

And what shall we call the old thing that was not signed away,
that no direct deposit can purchase,
that no employee handbook can address?
I do not know its name.
I only know it changed its costume when the prairie was parceled out,
when the rails were laid,
when the cubicles rose.
I say it slipped into the sedan and the train car and the elevator bank,
I say it put on a collared shirt and security badge and still kicked at the stall door,
I say it entered the revolving glass but did not wholly surrender the horizon.
I say it is there in the office worker at 7:12 a.m. staring into a station window and briefly seeing in his own reflection
not his tie,
not his fatigue,
not the small acne of stress at the chin,
but some older animal waiting behind the face,
some bronco of the soul,
some buffalo-memory,
still confronting some raw and foolish weather that yet brings him alive in the ribs.

So I ride this interstate and this train as if each were the open plain,
as if every blinking turn signal were a meadowlark,
every signal light a cardinal,
every streetlamp a sugar maple and every power pole a pine and every upraised phone tower a cottonwood,
as if the rumble strip and the rail-joint thunder were a July storm in the bones,
as if Bishop-Ford and Ogden and the long shining ribs of the tollway
were but new names for old immensities,
as if the wilderness had not vanished but only consented to wear a different skin.

Not yet tamed.
Not yet.

And for one moment on the expressway the lanes fall away,
the guardrails dissolve into tallgrass,
the overpass lifts into open sky,
the sedan is no sedan,
the commute is no commute,
the man in the driver’s seat is no employee, no debtor, no husband, no applicant, no username,
he is just a body moving fast over the surface of the earth,
he is just a heartbeat with a horizon,
the wind is not climate controlled,
the road is not a road but the old dirt track that existed before every road,
and the animal beneath him is galloping, galloping, galloping,
and the morning is not scheduled but infinite,
and the city behind him is not yet built,
and the city ahead of him is not yet imagined,
and he is nowhere,
and he is free,
and it lasts exactly as long as the guitar solo,
or the gap between stations,
or the held breath before the merge,
and then the lanes return, and the guardrails, and the dashboard, and the day.

I celebrate the office towers yet unentered,
the inbox yet unclogged,
the sweet tyranny of the schedule and the sweeter revolt of imagining none,
the calendar invite accepted in resignation and the calendar invite ignored in fantasy,
the child’s photo arriving at 8:03,
the boss’s gentle reminder,
the app offering me more music for my mood,
and the moment I resist them all and look out the window for rescue. For who among us, boxed fender to fender or crammed hip to shoulder,
has not felt the sudden wideness of the earth burst open like a secret gate
when the speakers drop a forgotten guitar riff,
or the train car neighbor’s paperback flutters open to something that pierces like an arrowhead,
or the skyline appears through industrial haze not as burden but as vision,
or the river takes one shard of morning light and returns it as gospel? Who among us has not, in the very machinery of necessity,
been ambushed by immensity?

Mannheim, La Grange, the Tri-State splitting north and south,
the Eisenhower, the Stevenson, the Dan Ryan, the Bishop Ford,
Cicero, Pulaski, Kedzie, Western, Ashland,
the Kennedy stacking up red past Montrose,
the ramp to Wacker, the ramp to Lower Wacker, the ramp beneath the ramp,
Ogilvie, Union, Millennium, LaSalle. Names, names, names,
I gather them lovingly,
for the map is not ashamed of detail and neither am I,
and the true geography is interior,
it tracks no longitude but wonder,
it measures not miles but recognitions,
not distance but quickenings,
not the progress from home to desk
but the old impossible crossing from sleep to self,
from self to role,
from role to the nameless rider still watching from within.

O brothers and sisters in business casual,
O republic of damp commuters and glowing screens,
O fellowship of bent heads and rising steam,
I say the wilderness gallops with us. It slips past the tollbooth,
it leaps the turnstiles,
it rides the express and the local,
it takes the auxiliary road and the exit ramp,
it drums on the steering wheel,
it crouches in the elevator before the doors part,
it goes badged and salaried into the tower,
it sits through the budget meeting,
it pretends to care about the quarterly deck
while pawing at the floor of the soul. In the instant the traffic lights cycle,
in the instant the doors fling wide,
we are mustang riders in the eternal dawn,
we are absurd, yes, and magnificent also,
a people half in harness and half in dream,
the city merely a mirage and an achievement,
the past a grassland still whispering underneath,
and each of us carrying, under the reasonable costume,
a creature that would prefer weather to walls,
distance to agenda,
song to memorandum,
though it consents, for now, to arrive.

Let the meetings queue up like clouds.
Let the push alerts ping like frantic sparrows.
Let the market open,
let the headlines churn,
let the calendar harden around the day.

I taste the coffee, now lukewarm, and praise it still. I praise the engine’s echo in my lungs,
the rail-song in my chest,
the thrum that threads every heartbeat on freeway and aisle into one braided rope of arrival. I praise the little courtesies,
the door held,
the seat offered,
the merger allowed,
the silence respected. I praise the old democratic miracle of strangers consenting to move together,
the joke of it and the holiness of it,
and the fact that even here,
even now,
amid badge scans and brake lights and algorithmic seas,
the wild horse has not been broken.

O morning of infinite forward motion,
I pour you out in long lines across the page,
I leave spaces wide as prairies between commas so the wild horse may run through,
so the bronco may bolt through syntax,
so the buffalo may darken the cubicle glass for one impossible second,
and I ask only this of you
that you, glancing up from cup or phone or quarterly forecast,

Remember what enormous thing you are.