Short Essay: The Plane

Once the luggage was out of the way, the passenger seat of the rental car reclined almost 180 degrees. My body went down with it, twinging tailbone flush and grateful against the bedlike plane, bare feet alighting on the sun-warmed patch of faux leather atop the glove compartment. The headrest was unreachable, crafted for a longer person, but a heavy head will rest wherever it can.

Read the rest in Quail Bell magazine.


photograph by C.M. Drysdale

Collision

Traffic is stopped on Old Shelter Rock Road,
Where usually there is no traffic.The minivan

Couldn't have been doing more than thirty,
But the motorcycle, crushed and grounded,
Gleams dully on the street.

Someone has covered the rider's face with a shirt.
He's laying on his back across the yellow lines,
Knees up like he's reading, or watching
Clouds go by.

photograph by Kou Hattori

Commute

The Volvo stops a few feet shy
of the crosswalk, the stop line,
the cracked door in the pavement.

Perpendicular to this drive, from the lawn
of the still-dark People's Bank, the ducks
head off to the marsh.

A young female stretches. She yawns, practically
pajama-clad in the entirety of her waking.

Her sister sits on all the good grass,
and she will not be moved.

A nip from somebody's mother
just as the light turns green,
and the brown birds pack up their night.






photograph by John Hanam

Another Rainy Weekend

I stay just ahead of the flat purple cloud
that clings to the rearview mirror.

Along Route 25 the maple trees
have flipped their summer skirts

and now tremble in the sudden wind,
arms wide to catch the rain.






photograph by flickr user Bold&Blond

Carwash in Allergy Season

You feel like a young elephant,
or an actor inside a great puppet.
Perfect bubbles slide like ice
as the grimy man waves
with the sprayer. "Neutral, sweetheart.

"Foot off the brake." Today
everything is like the first time.
You are still, in a body of water.
You are in a body, still in a body
of water, and still your eyes
are dry. You let go the wheel.

Pollen, insects, the ghosts
of the winter, all go melting
to the drain and you glide over.




photograph by Kevin Dooley

On the Exit Ramp

"Every time we round a curve," he'd said,
"I see you applying the brakes.
Hit the gas. Speed
into the turn."

And so she let up
on the brakes of ten years,
her driving instructor,
her mother, (this
is what we do for love),
the red flags in her feet.
She sped into the turn.

And it was indeed flight, the resolution
of girl and road, and she thought,
when they find my keys,
hot in the ashes of the crash,
Maybe, he will say, maybe,
Maybe I could have been wrong.



photograph by Eric Larson

Driving Home, Dayenu

The red-tailed hawk in the parking lot,
tracking me as I found my car.

The black bulk of the vulture
by the dry side of the highway.

The robin picking rock salt
from the deepest driveway cracks.

(A heart will swell until it bumps a rib
when the eyes report such wonders.)

If it had been these three,
it would have been enough.

The Waltz of the Houseguest

You cannot know what the room
was like that night. You were not in it.
The night air mothered new rain at the window.
Drops played soft on the pillow. Your pillow.

Nine months later I am driving,
two hundred miles away. Still your music
fills my ears. Today's air swells
with a silver belly of rain, and each
kissing breeze draws from me
fresh tears. This such beautiful air.
This my skin so damp, so blessed. This
no small miracle.

The road runs along a muddy creek bed.
The sad guitar tapers. A new song's beginning:
a choir of hidden frogs. I am water.
I am joy. I am lost.



photograph by flickr user riot jane

Driving Home

Orion knelt at the tree line. Venus was gone
from over the barn, and the raw thawing earth
refused my feet. I remembered what I'd heard
about Australia, and how the stars there
are hung upside-down. The winds have changed,
but still no word.





illustration from Bats and Swallows

Private Readings, Fortunes Told

You will take a strange journey.
In the night you will mistake crumpled Pepsi cans
for the eyes of deer. You will
apply the brakes. Around this sharp curve
a blinding truck with a plow, a sudden shock
of fog, and then the sweet black certainty
that nobody is looking for you.
You will size up each ditch in passing,
too much mud in this one,
that one too shallow. Your car will creak
and chuff against the dull grade
of the hill.

One wet mailbox
will become another, until like thawing fingers
you will rejoin the living, pull up
to the house. "He's here," you'll hear
your youngest sister say. "We thought
that you were lost."


photograh by Connor Tomas O'Brien

Morning Commute After the Ice Storm

At each tree's base, a carpet
of smashed ice, green in the young light
like broken Coke bottles. Concentric
circles around the trunk lead away
like melting waves, the shards
of crystal tinkling beneath each
creaking branch. There are
no trees in the graveyard, only
the wilted wreaths propped
against one illegible slab.




photograph by Tori Steffen

The View from the Passenger's Side

Down the long driveway: cotton mist.
Across the leaf-stamped street, a gully,
an avalanche of red and yellow,
a rotted canoe on the damp creek bed.

Traffic in upstate New York. The rain
comes quietly, but for miles before them
cars have stopped, in shock, like chickens.
Every radio station spews static. In the driver's seat
he bites his cracked lips, harder
with every braking moment. She wants him
to stop. Off the side of the highway
a mallard sails through slick weeds. He says
he will not stop. The white pill is stuck
in her throat.
The sandy shoulder of the road has flooded.
They get where they are going.

The drive home is blind, the roads reflective,
the stereo silent. She thinks of the hopeful,
abandoned canoe, that by now
it must be drowned.



photograph by flickr user mysimplesundaymorning

You Can't Be a Ghost, I Never Proved You Were Alive

Jesus, James. Twice in one week, sunset
has found me driving past the bookstore.
It is nowhere near where I live now,
but from time to time I need a smiling face,
a wave from the cash register.

Two times, James, two times. You
do not believe in coincidence and
your paranoia is contagious. Those trees
--manicured saplings in winter coats
of white sparks--

awaken as I watch. The light
is red at the corner of the parking lot.
I have the dreary length of this shuffling traffic
to shake my head and stare, to say,
Jesus, James, why now?

Airport Run, Friday Night

I drove through clouds to get to you.
They whirled from the sky, clinging to my mirrors,
and I could not discern how to wipe them away. This love
was a long time coming. Against the arch
of a rain-blurred rock near the highway
someone has painted two names,
a plump, resistant heart between them.



photograph by Eliza

After the Confession

Across the country, bridges are falling
Into the water.

The corners of his eyes shimmer with damp skin.
There is one tear trembling on his chin.

She leaves him on the couch and drives to work.
Above her the sky is filled
With pairs of birds, their spread feathers
Grasping the air like fingers.




photograph by flickr user Swami Stream

Valentines

The library did not have the book I needed.
“I’d better mark it missing,” said the limping man,
returning with me
to the reference desk. “It hasn’t been seen
in seven years.”

The radio news is noise in the car. I wonder
where my book is living, on whose
dusty shelf, if the thief even knows she has
what should be mine.

I park across the street from my house, still
muttering about the wasted trip.
The man on the radio strikes a sudden somber tone.
“The Air Force says now that all four men aboard
a bomber that exploded
over Qatar today”
—he pauses—
“are safely on the ground.” I exhale,
having held my breath for these
invisible soldiers,
the men I did not know existed.

On my way out of the library
I passed a Poetry Month table, the volumes
tipped on one end to showcase their slenderness.
The pages flipped fast
and my answers were not inside.
Lying flat on one end of the display,
an afterthought, a push
of a bored finger, Ted Kooser’s Valentines.
I bring it home.

In front of my neighbor’s house I pull
the Kooser from the car and slam the door.
The street is silent and I realize
the imaginary bomber passengers landed safely—
landed safely, only to return
to the incessant emergency
of war.
I realize that even as the NPR man informed me
of my own relief
they rose from their stretchers
and prepared to die all over again.

The library book, glassy in its plastic jacket,
Slips from my fingers
and lands on the wet road.
In that deafened moment my eyes know only
Black street, white book,
red heart.

H(a)unting

She took the long way home.
As she crested a hill she saw it:
The cloud-murked moon, color of the setting city sun,
seated on the horizon like a broken bowl.

She doubted her eyes and drove on,
winding through streets of darkened houses,
peering down driveways, crawling past the bars and jewelers downtown.

It caught her around the corner of a bakery.
The sight of it squeezed her heart and took fistfuls
of her lungs,
and she drove on, eyes wide, mind still.

untitled

The shadows of the deer flew
across the Post Road
just beyond the reach of my headlights,
hunched like fugitives.
There is a darkness, they told me
as they wandered into the trailer park,
that you cannot control, a drumbeat
you can neither silence
nor ignore.