The ideal piece of sculpture is a road.
                ---Carl Andre, on minimal art

Then I have wanted nothing in my whole life
but to be a sculptor of the severest kind.
That curve of the woman's body, Venus de

---broken here, broken there, at the head
of a new interstate, road paint gleaming
in a beautiful yellow, opaque and canary

skin, reflective of the eye's light and every
stroke of the artist's plaintive brush.
Driving south on 35, Minnesota into Iowa

into one more plain after a previous plain,
flat as canvas, as the chrome edge of a smoothing
knife, I am lost not in what will be the yellow

of the corn, nor the white of young wheat
budding across a moonlit horizon, nor even
in the black of the world beyond the brightest

headlamps, but in this: the yellow and the white
of the center stripe, the black of sweet tar,
the blending of maps strewn across the front

seat, each fragile, but only a replica of the real
art. I am carving. I am chipping into the heart
of a big, blank country, and its name is distance:

its signature is the tail of a blithering Ford---
so fallible, but cutting its way into the stone.