When Our Cars were Horses
We couldn’t see the twist of wires
hidden under sturdy flesh, and
the gears were faster, and whoa!
Our cars had ears and nostrils then
that filled with dust and forced our cars
to stop mid-street, the drivers calling out
their names. Oh yes, our cars had names.
Of course, our cars got hungry,
a bag of oats their gasoline. At night,
our cars stood in their parking spots.
A snuffle, a shake of the mane. Sometimes
our cars would dream of open fields,
feel the speed that was clenched in their
obedient legs, the spring that lived in
their clip-clop feet, the hanging air
just waiting to split as our cars shot through
leaving nothing behind but a shiver.
Landscape with Mother
Bills piled on the dining room table
and my mother with her head bent
under a bouffant of hair. Some might
think it’s worry that’s weighing her down,
that if not for the cost of living, my mother
would sprout wings, maybe soar across
a field where home and food and electric
were rich brown soil and berries and stars.
Some might say she could fly low
onto a jagged rock that juts up to meet her,
shapes itself to what she needs, the wildflowers
that grow in the tiny cracks
reaching up in surrender, in prayer.
Seeing Paul on Madison Avenue
McCartney, not the apostle, and me
walking past Vera Wang or Michael Kors
that small blip of Manhattan, up past the hum
of trucks and bicycle slice, that part that seems more
grown-up, subdued. Just like adulthood buffered
me, but there was Paul, bigger than my I Love Paul
button, bigger than the Ed Sullivan show, and teen-aged
me was whispering it’s him, it’s him, and it was, and
the whole universe shrinking down to a shiver. I might
have said hello, I don’t recall because everything was
cotton-stopped, the taxicabs were yellow submarines,
the crosswalks Abbey Road. I floated home that afternoon,
thinking how impossible that would have been–Paul walking
anywhere unmobbed, the city around me suddenly hushed.
Remember the time nothing happened?
Remember the tune from the juke box
that didn’t snap us youthward like some
cosmic rubber band? Remember how
the fragments of love just above never
quite assembled? How no one turned,
startled at our laughter draping the air
like Christmas tinsel? Remember your failed
attempt at Bogart cool, your eyes a dark
wander right through me? Remember the pair
of seconds before us and after? How
the sun and the moon never had that same exchange?
Remember the shift that didn’t take us
from being dead asleep
to suddenly wide awake?
Just yesterday
in the shower
of everything forgotten,
out popped a letter I wrote
to myself at 14. Funny,
even then, I was feeling
lost, reminding myself
it’s okay to grab onto
the rail and rest a bit.
It’s years later, jobs
and lovers and parents
gone, but here I am
holding this letter,
all yellow and ink-smudge,
still getting lost, still
reaching for the rail,
and wondering how
after all these years
and different apartments
life always manages
to find your address.