Ghost Gear: Poems

Driving into the Cumberland

DRIVING INTO THE CUMBERLAND for Peter Wyatt They know they aren’t the first or the last, clanging along in their clambake of 30-weight and redlined RPMs, blood brothers weaving in and out of the US-100’s metered yellow dashes. They’re sixteen making their way fifteen miles west of town to that sheer drop of Tennessee limestone where, gas pedal weighed down with a cinderblock and stick-shifted into D, they watch that V-6 peel out in a sidewinder of mud clods and black exhaust to somersault eighty feet to the Cheatham County Cumberland below. These are the days before death and finances will stop them back at the fork in the highway, the days when they still compare the putting on of a condom to suiting up for the moon and are angry at their fathers for being their fathers. When they think back on it, they’ll think it’s all the unknowing of sixteen years that drove them to that promontory, the Continental’s single headlamp coppering as it sank like a submersible in the waters made murky by runoff, to watch it disappear around a bend in the river and know for fact they’ve left their mark on the city of their births, to peer into the shallows of the riverfront eight blocks from their high school and envision that Continental at rest in that mausoleum of Cutlass Sierras and totaled GTOs. What was it about that Continental that just begged to fly? they’ll ask all summer, rewriting the details of their story beyond even their own disbelief. Just watch how, electing to stay in the car, they toss back the last dregs of their fifth of tequila, yell Fuck it! and floor that once luxury four-door, speeding for the cliff’s edge. What song Billy Corgan chirrs through the radio will change hands in the telling innumerable times. What degree of fullness the moon, they will 50 be wise to misremember. Look at them, swimming by its baleful light back to shore. Look at them lying and laughing together. Tonight they are alive. Tonight they are breathing. Neither is thinking of the long walk home. Neither yet knows that weaving their way back to town through the moonlit dark, that stumbling stoned along the edge of the highway they just drove, Peter will keep saying, Look, it’s the world. We’re finally seeing the world. 51 ...