Driving It


By then it was late
Spring, and the medians and berms had that

Morning-after look about them: weedy, unshaven, vaguely
Obscene. Anyone could see

What a good drunk it had been.
It was all that green,

For one thing, set off by how the sprung
Confetti of dogwood clung

To the woods' edge, and how the birches stuck and glinted,
A quiver of bolts Neptune might have shot

Off, showing off. The sky too was turning opal—
Forerunner of summer's usual

Milk—and like the stone its heart seemed shattered,
As if it were

At fault for snow
Cottonwoods in fact had made, letting their seedpods go.

I'd been driving. The bridge was out ahead.
No—the bridge ahead

Was under construction,
Traffic slow. We'd gotten

Used to it, inured:
The word

Itself a streak
On glass. So while the roadkill of the week

Before disturbed us, while it remained,
Uncannily, what it once had been—

Despite the neon
Orange X spraypainted on

Its back—we kept driving, stop-and-going,
And heard the river echoing

The drill when the drill quit.
Years ago, in Texas, my friend took us to visit

Austin's landmark,
Treaty Oak.

The tree had been poisoned—enormous,
Imploding, it looked, she said, like a house

Plant dying—and when I asked, rhetorically, Who would
Do a thing like that, shaking my head,

Someone like God,
Was what my friend said.

You see I drove that road every day. I didn't want to stop
Driving it. Someone blows up

A building, someone guts his muzzled pet,
Someone beats a child to death

And it's just more news
(And not) that loses

(And not) its horror by degrees. She's dead now, she
Was dying then. We didn't want to be

Used to it, but the bridge was
Out ahead, the sky was strange with snow. And there was

Something else as well, something almost delicate
In the arrangement of the corpse around the worksite.

Someone must have used his hands: the displays
Were too calculated to be achieved otherwise,

And anyone could see what a good
Job had been done. I drove that road

Every day. I didn't mind
The wait. I liked the treeline,

The undeveloped fields, the way, that time of year,
A cardinal said Here I
                       Here I
                      Here I am am am am am am am,
Claiming he was everywhere,

That every place was his,
And every thing. Or that it would be. Even this.