Designed for Flight: Poems

The Stuff

47 The Stuff The night he swerved his roadster down a gully and phoned me up for help, I drove out ready to shove him in the mud-slick ditch, spit in his eye what I knew he knew far better than any midnight friend—that the stuff was going to kill him, sooner than later, maybe someone else, a family perhaps— but when at last I found him off Highway 5, chilled and apologetic, under a moth-eaten blanket of sky, I couldn’t bring myself to scoff or even shake my head, he seemed so small, far off, as if peered at through binoculars turned backward. We stood awhile in silence—he swaying pinelike, me scanning the pike for cops, then musing on the muscled vista of black hills. I could hear the wind leaf nervously through its books, searching on my behalf for a timely piece of wisdom that might, miraculously, cure the man. I don’t know, he slurred, how to thank you, and I came this close to snapping Quit, but only cracked a smile—one meant to make me seem too worldly wise to judge. In fact, I was calling up, judgmentally, the beer that made him grabby, wine that stirred up song, the bourbon with its taste of sun-bleached leather, tightening the belt. And earlier, I lied. I rode out planning to bust him once, sharply in the teeth, to watch blood, not more regrets, pour from his mouth. 48 Wasn’t that the mouth that told me I could do anything with my life, anything on the page? Hadn’t he suggested, in writing of his own, that our spirits are so radiant they throw shadows of flesh and bone? Really, he said, I mean it, but I could hardly hear him. Already I was on my back, busy with chains, hooking them to steel behind our bumpers, working to pull him free. ...