Driven
What a strange word “driven” is,
none the stranger for being
hummed in a dream of driving
a DeSoto with three on the column,
the shifter tipped with a thimble.
“Too long a throw,” my father said,
driven from store to store
on rain-black streets, staggered
stop-lights every other block.
“Driven driven driven driven,”
he said, frowning. “You liked
Nash Ramblers best, right?
Brightest showroom in town!”
Absurd Ode
Why didn’t I write you after the one night we had? Five times a day
I should’ve written to conceive the slightest hope of doing justice,
a correspondence Victorian in its detail though not in the least circumspect.
If this were a voice-over, wind would rush through the leaves, “dappled”
the only word for the light, a four-note theme fingered on the gut strings
of a dreadnought guitar the aural embodiment of the rivulets coursing
the skin of two spent strangers no one will ever see. Your letters
would’ve found me with nothing but time in the motel five states away—
mushy apples, cellophane-sealed cupcakes & a permanent quart of beer
nestled in a trash can heaped with ice. I wouldn’t have tried to entice you,
just asked whatever questions I had, propped against the headboard,
inscribing my best block script on page after long yellow page,
the manager due his dollars each day, his phone never ringing with news
of a place to land where I’d come for reasons you made me want to forget.
I could’ve said anything I wanted, shaken out another day’s pages
dented with words I never before had meant so hard then folded them
in two they made such a fat parcel. It’s forty years now. It’s never yet
gotten any harder to think “If only”—one phrase among a geometrically
replicating profusion that earn the truest adjective of age: “Absurd.”
Still, once I’d found the converted carport in Shepherd, Michigan,
I should’ve strolled to the drop on, yes, Main Street, shoved that day’s
packets into the slot & unlocked the P.O. box packed with things you had
to tell me, along with the clippings, feathers & pine needles of home.
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