Cormac McCarthy: The Road as Prose Poetry 2

[I continue my selections for turning The Road into a volume prose poetry. Each of these would have their own page, in my imaginary version.]

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

The road was empty. Below in the little valley the grey serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling in the ash, each the other's world entire.

Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of medowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. The shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds too and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

This is the day to shape the days upon.