UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE


1899. Henry Bliss, real estate man,
steps off a streetcar and is promptly hit
by a taxicab. Is promptly crowned
Premier Holy Martyr of the Road.
The first man killed by an automobile
in the New World.

111 years later. My fate rubs elbows
with the ghost of Mr. Bliss. I did not
think of Ford or Gatsby or Ferlinghetti.
Strangely I thought of music,

that some overwhelming orchestration
would take reign,
that we would flirt past the other car
like jazz notes swallowed
by city poets.

Instead we hit like steel-breasted bulls.
A sound rose up—No it was not a train No
it was not a storm Quite simply it was
the sound
of two-ton bodies
hurtling inexorably
toward
one another.

1909. The Futurists insisted
that a motorcar was more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace.
That we are all reeling birds, yes.
A raven painted Model-T black.

Clouds in the car. Clouds in the chest.
Mushroom balloons blooming
at 100 miles per hour, loosing smoke
like a wineskin, striking my heart dumb,
burning a sickle into my right arm.

All those blinking lights on the dash. Like so many eyes watching.

Something brutal, something lived through.
I climbed out of the crushed shell
of that movable self and into the crosshair
of downtown streets.

“A poem is a machine made of words.”
Said William Carlos Williams

A poem knows there must be blood in ore.

-----

I was in a car crash last week. Though my wounds are minor, my thoughts have not recovered from the big noise. It seems impossible that I could be driving along, thoughts meandering, about small things, and then suddenly be spun into violent Erlebnisse. The accident report reads 99, can't say which of us ran the redlight. It is hard to talk with insurance agents over the phone. They want all the details of my claim. Among the things I don't say to them: I am scared of cars now they look like monsters and roads look like lifelines; so many people keep saying "The important thing is you are still here" I do not know what to make of it what an unthinkable sentiment (the alternative ineffable) and yet the politeness strikes me absurd-absurd; the powdery smoke that filled my car was like gray snow; my father did not answer when I called him from the wreckage and that wrecked me further; I am ashamed that I could not show some humanity to the other driver that I just knelt on the sidewalk and cried like a child.

Something in this trauma seems distinctly American--but of course, it isn't. O how my Song of the Open Road is perhaps forever blighted. I have been riding my bicycle to school, fighting nervous breakdowns and feeling ridiculous. Though my only conspicuous scar is a shiny pink crescent on my forearm, I feel marked. Every traffic light bears a green beacon, though East Egg remains far off.

Car crashes are so common that they almost seem meaningless. The worst kind of death: accidental, could've-happened-to-anybody. We do not like to think our undoings will be arbitrary. That this life, lived so long, could be so succinctly seared shut. As it stands, the car is dead and I'm alive. Can't say fairer than that.

I attended a reading by the poet Paul Guest a few days after the wreck. I was not especially acquainted with his work. In fact, I'd only ever read one of his poems. In high school a friend showed me "The Resurrection of the Body and Ruin of the World" and I was moved in a pristine way. While that poem stayed with me, I hadn't read anything else. I certainly hadn't known the poet was quadriplegic until someone mentioned it offhandedly just before I entered the lecture hall.

His reading was beautiful. He read from what looked like a Kindle, using his mouth to direct some makeshift stylus across the screen. At one point, he lurched forward and pecked at the screen with his nose. Like the most charming bird ever. I left the reading enamored and a little haunted. I can't accurately express how it felt to ride my bike home when it was a bicycle accident that paralyzed that brilliant poet. That the night air felt charged and eerie and yes, sadly lucky. I do not mean to romanticize misfortune--be it mine or someone else's. I am always feeling sad and lucky. But Paul Guest ranks high in the list of strangers I have loved almost. His words are well-lit, vital. Days after and still I feel gifted.

When he signed my book, he asked if I was a writer. I always get shy at this question. Unsure whether I have earned the title or if I'm still fumbling around in the literary gutter. When I told him I was just an undergraduate, he said, "Oh, so you still have time!" And that was impossibly reassuring.

I wanted to ask him how he actually pens his work. But I didn't know if that would be offensive. I am always chasing after words as they race off and always fearful that I have lost them. And I still have use of my hands. I wonder how Guest arrives at his lines. With what lariat.. Lately I have been writing by hand almost exclusively. Meaning gets rangey enough on its own. Sometimes the abstraction of my latest poem is compounded by the abstraction of virtual space and and and I start to wonder what this whole luckless labor is even getting at. Paper, like skin, reassures me. The solidness of an instrument hooked in the hand, not just typing away into mechanical light--there's something to be said for that too. Not to mention the little birds' feet of ink staining the fingertips, spidering out in wales. Evidence of weight in words even if they seem aery when spoken.

Not just Spirited but Bodied.