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Southern Cultures 10.3 (2004) 86-87



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The Last Lap of the Daytona 500


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Photograph courtesy of altoGames (public domain).
When Dale Earnhardt dies, I'm standing in Uncle Doc's kitchen,
listening to the men put across the woe of the penalty of NASCAR.
Since this is the day of Ann's funeral and most of us have driven a long way
to hear the Episcopalians in their smart white robes say all but nothing
about Ann who lived among us our entire lives as we ourselves lived among us
since she was also us, it seems to the men unfeasible that beyond Ann's death
there's now the death of Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt.

Before the wreck (get this) I was writhing as only I would
that the men were watching the race while the women prepared some casseroles. [End Page 86]
Unlike Ann, I was writhing. Then the knock and the spin and the splash
of the crash, and even if the men didn't drop their glasses and fall to their knees
and weep, you could tell that's what they were after with all their hollering.
Knowing that made me think that the empty winter trees looked like nerve endings
as we drove from Ann's casket and the immaculate church there below
the sun. The winter trees know there's no sense in trying to change people.
O uncles, cousins, fathers, brothers: sit in your chairs all week long
and mourn the death of the great stock car racer Dale Earnhardt, if you want.
This poem reviles instead the rubbish Episcopalians speak in small Virginia chapels
re: my mother's sister Ann who died of a hard-working, charitable heart
while downstairs in the dark Earnhardt blazed in churning spheres of counterfeit light.

Adrian Blevins teaches at Roanoake College in Salem, Virginia. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation award for poetry and author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes and The Brass Girl Brouhaha.

Ed. note: This poem appeared in Adrian Blevins's The Brass Girl Brouhaha, published in 2003 by Ausable Press.



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