Songs For Driving

(A Temporal Sacrament)

Joshua Isaac Wood

Maybe she had never been just right, it had been too late, too early, but

They could always take a drive and work out life. Something repeated

too often. Her words, spoken in tumescent passion

just before The Act

Came from some song with its tune lost to their dissipations and their scatterings,

Misplaced beyond the single-point perspective of their remembrance

The polish wears from any charm, but resolute she had placed hers, to make love decorous

The tarnish was bound to accumulate, its luster-lack planning journeys for him

He needed forgiveness before he had ever even begun, before the rains

And her fading indistinguishable into the surrounding night

His car carried him like a rifle report round and echoing in the sickness

of grey-green clouded moonlight, through the state lines

and the dotted lines, the no-passing zones, the back roads south

Expressions of the sleeves-rolled youth of a nation with which

he felt tied. Tied now to nothing but his tenuous motion, he relied

on the steady decline of the fuel supply, marking for distance, steering the darkness,

dodging introspection like the holes wore in the highway; tiny abysses

seeming deeper at night, with shadows settling along their edges. Contents rattled

in his sensible married compact car. She made him think of it.

He hated her aloud while falling into the moon's illusion of a hovering liquid eye

above the ribbon-way over which he rolled in the unresponsive darkness. He was

rebellious in turn channel-surf nonchalant, as if he did nothing.

Her pilloried words wilted in his judgment.

He woke the morning, alone while together with a dark-skinned girl without name

Bought for her piquant contrast to another's corn-fed white. He woke to Mexico,

saying it again to this darkened-tanned tequila girl, recited it

while knowing that it was the prized possession

of a previous girl. "So that was how she loved me, baby,"

He made that final confession, while in the nauseous sweat of a Ciudad morning

No available absolution was found