Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Under the Steering Wheel

• 86 under the Steering wheel We meet again, you the boy I most respected in high school. A self-made millionaire, you tell me right off you’ve done it morally and your next goal in life is to become a wise man. You remind me of what I’ve never forgotten, that it was you who bought my car when I married two weeks after graduation, more cherry than any of the boys’. And you tell me what I have forgotten, our date to the Junior Prom. “You said you couldn’t kiss. Doubi was overseas but we could just go together. Then back up at your house end of the night you said one kiss would be okay. I got out, you lay back under the steering wheel, your head on the seat.” You tell me this almost as a question, as if all these years you’re still trying to understand something inexplicable. “Outside I bent over, kissed your lips upside down like that.” At first I don’t remember, can’t imagine. But I take your word for it, strange and out of character. Out of story. That the question in your aura isn’t years of your one wife’s jealousy, her obsessing on your sexual fantasies, or the locker room gossip still carrying on here. Or of even a secret erotic image you’ve never uttered and this is why you are whispering. (Though if so I am honored.) I take your word for it, this beautiful picture you give me though something worries me too, how the slander against me has never abated since those days, all of my societies like high school in that ugly way. If I could tell you the lies told of me. If I could tell you how many times my heart’s been broken, karmically forever by this hill of persecution I fled, wisdom would be yours as infinite as the stars. Then the smell of car plastic, then the feel of my two large alabaster breasts falling forward to my face • 87 from the coral strapless that had been my cousin Billie Jean’s before she died in the car accident, her taffeta petticoats and hoop up to the windows. (Maybe lying back on the seat was the only way to maneuver to your lips.) Then the perfect round of the steering wheel, then the long shaft of the column and the pungent sage of Olive Hill looking up the underside of the saguaro cactus and date palm and the zillion stars whirling overhead, where we’ve come from since the beginning of time and where we’re going into extra galactic space, it comes back clear as the Milky Way, Puchipa the real ones of this place call it. So let me explain. How will you begin your study if you don’t know this? I lay down an odd girl so wise she was already an old man. I lay down on that seat under that most beloved wheel of my life, what would become, though we didn’t dream it then, our mutual steering wheel out of there. The smell of plastic rose to my nostrils, it was the only thing to do. One kiss not of lust. Not a broken vow, not betrayal, not infidelity. Not seduction, not submission (except to the Cosmos). Not duty, not for material gain. Not reputation, not abandon, not mindless, not crazy, not immoral. But for my lips to meet your lips, for my body to breathe in your breath. For your body to breathe in my breath. This was important. I never dreamed then my life of words from these. Nor yours of moral money. We were both so poor then but even then it was that nothing else was wise. You and I. The absolute demand of the moment, the Truth. A photo taken by the stars. —For Richard Smith ...