Car

Everything in life is somewhere else,

and you get there in a car.

E. B. White

The more you drive, the less

intelligent you are.

REPO MAN

Ah, the endless riding, riding in the family car,

the fun of slapping the unworn upholstery

to make the angry dust motes whirl,

the fun of standing up and looking out the back

to see the road unwind, to watch the driver

in the following car forced to look

at my many ugly faces. The fun of

bickering with my brother, and my mother's

carefully-drawn, imaginary line

down the center of the seat.

The provocation, the violation of that line!

The world slid by in a square of safety glass

and I left everything behind except

the three who shared this privacy,

this tin can moving stop-and-go

through the countryside.

Do you remember the first time you held

the steering wheel? Such sudden circularity!

You with your mouthful of Os

and your little round face

in the great round world, all drive shaft,

flywheel, pistons, gauges, gears, rolling,

rolling through the synchronicity

of foot and hand,

hand and eye, eye and speed. The meaning

of the word release. You had the intimacy

of the DJ and the sentiment of song,

you could ride along on music,

you could ride along on air, destination

never mattered, just the getting there,

and how.

"I drive, therefore I am," we say

to one another breathlessly, whispering

sleek syllables of horsepower and style:

Toyota, Jaguar, Thunderbird . . . Mercedes... .

(Hello, Fm 5'8'' tall, brown hair, brown eyes,

100 miles per hour in my sky-blue Subaru.

You're 5'11'', Cadillac, Dolby, air, the works.

We both believe in fuzzbusters and speed.

We're free, we're really free, just give us

keys and credit cards. Just give us

accurate directions to where we think

we want to go.)

Isn't your car like a pet . . . or a pest?

How you talk to your car! How it talks to you!

How it knows, like a wife, your failings,

like a husband, your urge to disappear.

How, simply driving to lunch one day

in Duluth, or Missoula, Montana,

the car, as impulsive as you, decides

on a Mexican combo plate in Tijuana.

Next thing you're ordering in Spanish,

quisiera, you say, or por favor. You're buying

gasolina barata, you both want it all

before you spend your last peso

to make that phone call home.

Once, south of Tijuana in the Baja,

I drove through a land so vast,

so filled with hostility

it seemed to want to slough me, car and all,

from its spiky mountain spine.

It wanted to convert us into rust and bone,

headlights bashed, hood and trunk agape,

and, hunching in the driver's seat, a vulture

with a tummy full of human jelly.

I imagined that, then vertigo.

The asphalt

slipped. Boulders softened and began to float,

the earth fell upward into blowing waves of sand,

giant cacti rooted in the sky, and the sky

pooled into sheets of purple light.

The car and I rose, aglow, doors flapping

like an exhausted metal angel.

Then our single face caught fire with sun

and glare, and we were driving, driving

for whatever lay behind us

in the rearview mirror.