The Drive

The farm, the phone, the mother,
the Keystone State, the story

of her son, the Indian, who had to pee
and got lost in a 7-11; the story

of the Greek cousin, islandhopping
before his time; the story

of a strand of your sweatshirt
in the car, wound around your winding

finger; the smoke, the song
about the sun, as the winter sun

played through the smoke coming
against the window of the car,

parked alongside the park, a sign
telling a story: a Revolutionary

War battle it is said
two brothers were caught on either side of;

this is my grandfather's watch,
it ticks in this way, only one way;

I speak among voices
in the newspaper, grafted

onto the King's Bible, being
a passenger of a moving

system of steam and oil
still in the middle ages before

the child awoke to a glimmering
present in the passing

planes yet predating
the genius of wings;

it was written -- rock by water,
by the mother making foozball

from the textbooks; in the morning
by the river in the light

of the lessons in the blooming
of the breath against the colder

canvas of the naked forest; in the received
knowledge of a series of mountains,

with tales of a bird on the edge
of the porch, a message

from the Great War now
like a melody no heartstrings move

by, the forgotten boat
on a string by the exposed roots --

a melting of snow to
reveal the parallel lines, the shining

road, the quivering wheel --
or was it "ear"?

-- one takes a chance by
writing a thing as whole

as "wheel" when riding in a car
is far from what one is doing;

rather one gathers
the pull of the father,

like Yeats in his watery
grave across

the speech-thickened Atlantic,
reaching from the shroud-white

page of the ground
among a host

of punctuated shadows,
to release this fear

to the riverbright babble, tuning
out the Castle -- to hills, rolling...