In this long poem, Young chronicles a trip along the Mississippi River in seventy-eight stanzas.  These vignettes of life on the road—post-retirement and post-Hurricane Katrina— build upon one another and create, as the psychologist James Hillman said of dreams, their own metaphorical reality.  The speaker of these poems refuses distillation, offering instead a sweeping witness of nature and human activity along the river; little escapes his notice: “It’s 5 a.m. A coyote’s in the road. / A ‘possum stands still in the cornfield. / As a ‘coon climbs out of the state park trash, / the campground host waves goodbye. / At the window       his wife washes          her underarms.”