Driving home one day from
a neighbor’s funeral, you feel a
thump under the wheels and think
perhaps you’ve driven over something.
You look up in the mirror to see what it was.
Behind you is a black sedan, glittering,
with huge tailfins, a ring-and-crosshair
hood ornament—pushing your butt, you think,
some doctor’s kid, some snot-nosed
junior executive trying to run you off
the road, the little prick. You shake
your fist, give it the finger, but it only
hovers in the mirror, windshield darkly
opaque, reflecting patches of blue sky
through the skein of branches overhead.
You know how to handle tailgaters.
At the next crossing you nurse amber
and when red flashes you gun across.
The sedan guns with you. For the next
mile or seven you cut speed from time
to time, tap your brakes: it cuts, it brakes.
You head straight for the highway on-ramp,
go slow-slow at the Yield sign: it goes
slow-slow and then jack-rabbits out into
the rush of traffic with you, jumping
lanes when you do, drunkenly, careeningly.
You press the pedal to the floor. Within
an hour the two of you are hurtling through
farm country, climbing foothills, roaring
through lonesome one-light towns,
screeching around war monuments,
hopping sidewalks, veering across fresh-
cut lawns, battering swingsets. You pivot
onto sudden access roads, you perpetrate
U-turns at drawbridges: the black sedan
is like a smart-bomb, it has a lock. What
have I done to warrant this, you wonder, it’s
not like I murdered someone. Looking back
over your life you see the regularity of it,
the day in and day out of it—work, TV,
hash and beans down at the Mayflower,
all that systole and diastole, where has
it gotten you? What was it for? You slow
a bit to look at cornflowers along the side
of the road, you think how beautiful,
how rich this life can be with all
its sufferings, sweet triumphs, loves.
Why did you let it pass from you? What
were you afraid of after all? In your mind
you see your neighbor’s eyes as they
must have appeared upon the shock
and outset of that silent attack. What
did he think about as all receded? What
lost dreams stood lined up in his brain
like angry creditors as rasping he sank
to the floor among waste baskets and
computer wires, one fluorescent lamp
above him flocked by day moths? How
useless all the planning and deferments,
better to live each moment fully, you
realize, as at an overlook you’re out
of gas. Night’s fallen. The sedan pulls up,
cuts engine. You roll down your window,
breathe an air sweet with primroses, pears
and jewel weed, you hear birds chanting,
see below you glittering silos, dark fences,
moonlight glazing the horn-tips of slumped,
slumbering cows. You honk twice, smile, you
realize now it had to be this way. The black
sedan’s headlights stare past you, its
windshield displays the stars
in their purblind arrangement tacking off
through an abyss so infinite, so cold,
it can afford to be patient as
one by one they gutter out.