Eleven days on a motorcycle — listening to the engine scream into the north country of Wyoming and Montana — will do funny things to your head.

There’s the stubborn shiver of steel below your body, vibrations squirming up your spine and jangling the lining of your brain. There’s the violent crackle of pistons firing near your feet. There’s the unexpected swells of air pummeling your face and sliding through gaps of your glasses and helmet. Bugs messily pelt the windshield. Oncoming trucks groan toward you. The pavements blurs into long stretch of gray.

The experience is thick and frightening and beautiful. The motorcycle forces you to taste the swung-open sky of Wyoming and, of course, the prairie — a prairie that will make you understand space — raw, empty, baffling space.

Cross into Montana, with her gentle dark colors of pine and hay and water, witnessed as you spin through Bozeman, Missoula and finally into Glacier National Park, the chilly breeding ground of grizzlies, wolves, moose. Look up and you’ll see the disappearing glaciers which weakly cling to mountains and drizzle away between the exhaust pipes of  RVs and SUVs.

There are moments when the mind can only handle so much of these vistas and becomes pleasantly stuffed with natural beauty. The evening calls for a different silence and experience — those found on the page, between words and stories and poems.

But pack these books wisely, for there’s no space for clutter or comforts on a motorcycle. Just essentials. In fact, I imposed a two-book limit on my trip, and deciding on these titles was harder than navigating a washed-out muddy road near the Montana town of Twin Bridges.

In the end I went with James Galvin’s novel, “The Meadow,” and Jim Harrison’s collection of poems, “In Search of Small Gods.”

They’re a funny pair. Galvin is a widely respected poet who’s only written two novels. Whereas Harrison is novelist first, and poet second. In other words, the writers have switched roles, and it doesn’t take long to notice this.

Galvin’s novel is written in shards, fragments of prose, separated by chapter breaks. The shortest of these shards is a few sentences, while the longest is only a few pages. His territory is the northeastern border of Wyoming and Montana, just south of Laramie, which is where Galvin is from. His characters are high-altitude farmers, the descendants of homesteaders.

Sticking with his poetry background, Galvin is interested in moments, images, crystalline reflections. He’s interested in collaging these images together to represent how people live in the most inhospitable climates — pitifully brief summers, and winters so long that can easily snap you sanity; this is the place of cattle drives, unbroken horses, and sometimes fatal self-reliance; it’s a place where pleasures are found in warm things, fireplaces, cups of coffee, dry wool socks.

There is no dramatic story in “The Meadow.” So if you’re a mystery reader, this probably isn’t for you. Instead, we get lucid slivers of real people trying to stay alive. And it’s done with language that deserves a patient mind, an open mind, a mind that has spent days staring into that stark landscape.

Switching from “The Meadow” to Jim Harrison’s “In Search of Small Gods” is unusually fluid, as if they were meant to travel together. Harrison is that legendary, archetypal Montana writer whose books include “Legend of the Falls.” His poetry reads like his best lines of prose, balancing everyday clarity with moments of exuberance. There are no poetic tricks, odd line breaks, or moments of experimentation with the form. It’s just good sentences, ranging from the charred worlds of Arizona to the bite and freeze of Montana.

And if you happen to be passing through the swollen greenery of Glacier National Park, I would recommend a poem in the collection called, “Spring.” He writes:

“This small liquid mouth in the forest is called a spring, but it is really a liquid mouth that keeps all of the secrets of what has happened here, speaking in the unparsed language of water, how the sky was once closer, and a fragment of a burned-out star boiled its water. This liquid mouth has been here since the glaciers and has seen a few creatures die … to sleep under a deep mantle of snow or feel the noses of so many creatures who came to drink, even the man who sits on the forest floor, enjoying the purity of this language he hopes to learn someday.”

These are the kinds of lines that stick with you on a long motorcycle trip. They tangle in your head, explaining and un-explaining themselves on those long stretches where you deal with nothing but time.

“In Search of Small Gods” by Jim Harrison and “The Meadow” by James Galvin are slim but wise partners to bring on any journey. I was happy to have them tucked in my tank-bag, rattling along as the miles molted away, as the weather played along the horizon, and as the days finally ended and we made camp, bringing our bodies back down to the ground, to listen, and to become, as Harrison just told us, “the man who sits on the forest floor, enjoying the purity of this language he hopes to learn someday.”