when we were no one
Nineteen,
when we were no one
among friends,
some who irritated us,
some we loved
hiding in plain sight in a night of the endless midwest corn,
the great methane pile spread out in rows to the horizon
of an American September;
Some drunk,
some pretending,
taking turns shooting an old gun at the fire
to watch the embers become a shower of stars
before slamming the doors of our cars and lighting up the roads
in all directions
like sparks from a wheel
as the trailing smoke of our trajectories
dispersed across the plain
and proved
we are alive.
We were stupid.
We were all powerful.
We were the greatest whoever lived
when we were no one.
*April is national poetry month
approaching an intersection
yellow light, red light, green light
winding out October
Driving the Mustang down a road called The Devil’s Backbone
cruising in the Edsel a few years ago.
The Shadows Across the Ground
folded into a letter to my friend.
Music, Arvo Part, Fur Alina
The glow of the dashboard on him
[second draft]
I remember the first time I was ever in awe of a car.
I was a kid in the very back of a 1982 Ford Crown Victoria station wagon. It was a dark night on highway 89 up in the mountains of New Hampshire. I must have been 7 or 8. Dad, the glow of the dashboard on him, the corner of his eye in the rearview mirror, said, “watch what’s about to pass us.”
I perked up and saw low headlights behind us, to close to the ground. Something was wrong. The headlights were low, as if the lights were projecting the road before it like a movie, like a plot, like a storyline where the ending is just beyond the reach of the headlights. The car flung passed us. It was chopped and low, flat black, with a tiny rear window on a long sloping back. It looked like it got its shape from driving at speed, like a drop of hot lead flung across the face of the earth, streaking an inch above the ground and leaving a blackened road in its wake. Dad glanced at the dashboard, the needle on the Ford’s massive speedometer lazily bobbing, to gauge the speed. He said only “51 Mercury.”
As it climbed up and towards the sky along the slope of highway on the mountains before us, only a fading red glow of bullet shaped tail-lights was visible. The car moved as if the draw to move forward was a greater newtonian force than gravity.
That’s the definition of the awe: that need to move, as if the car were not designed simply to go, but instead made to sail in that universal language of movement over time to show us what velocity means like a new category of vocabulary, to show us that these aren’t miles per hour, these are the miles of our hours.
Dad said it more succinctly with a disbelieving “Look at her go.”
