WHERE SHE WAS GOING
She didn’t know where she was going.
Fenceposts clipping by like bullets
in a cartridge belt
in a black-and-white movie
where everyone who gets killed should.
Real life is in color
unless it’s getting dark
White lines on black roads
schlip ... schlippering
down the middle of a car
driven by a woman
who looks like she’s getting a cold
and acts like she’s getting a temperature,
thinking the same things over and over
with that feverish fixity the mind falls
into and can’t get out of.
Oncoming cars slue unusually, their
familiar, usually soothing wet whisper
scheee- … scheee- ... schee-ooop …
slipping her back into nights in the back
of Dad’s blue-green four-shift chrome-trimmed Dodge
drifting home from the Fair
between a brother and another
on a pallet that smells, peppered
with popcorn, pretzels, salt,
hay stems their pants-cuffs had caught
from the flooring of hazy animals,
a little bit sticky with pink gluts -
candy they couldn’t rub out
after two or three spins in the bumper cars.
It doesn’t seem real
that Then or this Now
slipping past, an impression, not time,
but deep, secret, repetitive, symptomless
moments marked as a metronome measures
wheels over seams and dark asphalt patches
on roads that in time return as a melody
stuck in the mind where only the first
few words of the chorus survive
but the smell of the tune goes on
til you drift out to see
no cars and no coming attractions,
and the only things living are dreams.
.