Drive / Three Parts

Drive / Three Parts

Run down that road, man
Red clay and gravel, washboard to scrub anything
You know how to do it
Just point the grill and shoot for the moon
You know you'll miss, so
Nobody gets hurt. Or gets out.
A little Rage in the box, a little fuel
Now, look man:
This is no long goodbye.
Wire guided and wound up tight,
Flying, this time.

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Drive / The Second Part

In the long bellybottom of the road
Ninety is the new sixty
Until that place, you know the one, man
Where the water claims the road for days
Every spring and leaves deep fingerprints.
Sideways in the cage
And you chip your tooth on that half-open window.
Then up the hillside, gravel buried
Under some cousin's cousin's work
For the Highway Department.
A windshield speck becomes a porchlight
And you focus on it like a moth.
Like there was ever any question.

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Drive / The Last Part

The light keeps pushing backward
Dragging the porch and the little house with it.
Hard up against that hill, all vines
And poplars and cottonwoods
Green as money in the daylight, washed grey
Here in this light, with the certainty of a mirage.
Dusk or dawn, you can't remember
And it doesn't matter anyway...your grill is pointed at that light,
Flickering and blown through with candlefly wings
And the smoke of ten thousand cigarettes.
Across the millstone-step and painted porchboard
A screen door tilts out against a spring, and slams back
Into that dark room. She scratches a match to life
And touches that burn against a fresh stick and waits.

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©2007 Timothy W Holland