The Government of Nature

Driving South from Salem

48 Driving South from Salem Autumn, 2009 In the slow crawl up the highway, near the signs for Massachusetts, the road less cruel than it was the night I drove down from Philly, my father beside me in his last Chevrolet, a rain so thick our throats felt full with tongue the way it is when the woman beside you is more than you can ever be, and sometimes I think I am a coward in the heart, and what an unkind thing to think, after bringing a failed heart back to life, after meeting my mind’s ghosts, taking them down through the threshing, a daily act of forgiveness, the one prayer. It has been a good meeting with a circle of friends, all of us damaged children inside, under the facade of adults busy at being grown. There are signs for places with cheeseburgers, coffee, muffins at every angle, somewhere it seems these lines should be more carefully metered, some anapest for the way night goes, two soft moves and the moon’s silent drum in the distance, the long stretch that is too far to walk, our bonds to cars and highways so busy with this ground to speculate on turning upward to the moon and still stay in the lines of the lane. Hushed and still as one blink of an eye asleep at the wheel, there were no lost chances for me— this poem that could never have been a sonnet, the wounds of Baltimore too deep for faces that want to cast spells on a lyric that had to look into life’s finality and find a reason to laugh. ...