Litany from the Driver's Seat
When I was fifteen I learned, from the passenger
seat of an interchangeable Toyota,
that driving was a game you could win
if you never stopped. Since then I became
little more than a passenger, rarely pushing thirty
on a residential. But the night I remembered
the game of not stopping I didn’t sleep, just tore
my eyes open to the road and my left hand
through the air like I knew where the highway
stopped and the sky began.
Now I am all the silent motion; the slow
and the fast; the constant; the fingers tracing
the wind; the wind tracing the fingers; I am
the crystallized remnants of speed scattered
among the smell of burnt rubber; I am the expanding
of the suburbs, the crawling of the commute,
and the California stop; I am the squirrel
running across the road and the crow
flying from under the wheel; I am the always
here; I am the steady death of the deer
off the shoulder; I am the lonely pace of life
and that massive earthly falling after.
Originally published in LIGEIA
Rhiannon Briggs