Driven
I. Fuel
Inkhead wants to know
what I am driving at
when I say drive.
Just drive, she says,
tossing me
the keys. I idle,
touching the ignition
now that a car
needs no key,
no handler,
not even
me. I reach for the stick
shift, the handbreak,
the choke,
retrieve an imaginary
clutch. No passenger
knows
what a driver knows,
her grip
on the wheel, foot
on the pedal
flat
to the floor. My hand
to eye equals
foot to gut
coordination. Speed
equals oxygen
to the brain. The dead
ends of my hair
dragged through the air,
pull the roots
alive. Did she say
or did I say
drive?
II. Late February
The sun is driving my car
whose top
is peeled halfway back,
so my dog’s nose
is pitched straight up. And
though I am recovering
from a cold, the heat
and the motionless sky
have convinced me
I need fresh air
in my lungs. My lungs
remain mute, but not so
the crows in the reeds.
They tower over the two of us
in the low-slung car
stopped on Narrow River Road
not really a river
but a slender body
leading to the bay, with
a horde of Canada Geese
barking their hollow barks.
Great swaths of them paddled
to shore to see us
in a V shape
the way they fly. Tame?
I would say: curious. I was
a little nervous, my little mutt
so small he looked
like bait. Soon,
in pods of five or six
or nine, then a dozen cut out
over the fields
over our heads, and disappeared
to where the crows gathered
here. So when we stop,
our windows
have to come down
to hear the conversation
between geese and crows, arguing,
agreeing, complaining,
almost human the confusion
over what to do now.
III. Inkhead’s Inventory
This is the blade that wipes
the glass that clears the rain/
snow/leaves that
cuts the chemical
mix that cuts the salt
mud from the road that clouds
the curved surface,
and stays that way
to let the wind
glide over it.
All of this and none of this
is metaphor for what
is seen through,
mitigating
gale winds, the direct
experience of which
is delayed just enough
to allow
an inventory of emotions
by that which is eyed, eared,
nosed, lipped ––
containing expression,
something
the body, too, shows
but not as
clear as the head.
IV. Caper
When I am an eraser I can do
anything. Mistakes may be made
with impunity. Here’s one now.
I leave space for a ___________
or ________, the wrong style car,
one parked too long on the lawn
killing the grass. I write
as though paper will never be
priceless, it crumples
and springs back. The invention
of the pencil protects me
from permanency and
practicality. Ideas are not
commitments. This jaw line
may be drawn smooth, not
cracked, to receive a caress.
I draw shade and under it
a neck, shoulders. I dream
this to be me, that dreams
matter. If I can be my dream,
and live it too, so can you.
V. The Motorist
“Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.”
– Susan Sontag
A picture of a car and its driver
competes poorly
with the road, the cliff, the sea
moving, metabolizing
in real time, between the driver
and her heap,
her free arm open
her hand catching and letting go
atoms and atoms of that
which shall remain
nameless
so long as she knows
she is free to not be
where she’s expected to go.