Pileup
Because everyone’s going eighty,
everyone goes eighty. Of course,
there’s always one who doesn’t get it,
who goes slower when wind is blasting
sheets of snow across the highway,
a blinding veil called a white out,
while patches on asphalt as shiny black
as obsidian are called black ice.
The ten feet where side mirrors fail
to reflect, like how vampires vanish
in them—a little levity to lighten
the TED talk— is called the blind spot.
So boom. The sensation of powerlessness
when an SUV—neither a car nor a truck,
technically—spins around three times
three hundred and sixty degrees
like The Tornado ride at a county fair,
stifles breathe and puckers the butthole,
and yet feels hallowed, like awesome--
which is Edmund Burke’s description
of The Sublime—that is called a paradox.
More booms. Vehicles of all makes
and models, head-on or sideways, smack
into wrecks ahead; trucks jackknife,
but the thumps grow softer, more distant,
like how someone in a cozy bed
upstairs can hear bottles of green beer
popping their caps in the basement.
The white vapor rising is steam,
smelling like stale water in a rubber
hotwater bottle, while black smut
mixing amid flying snowflakes is smoke.
Always there are ones who appoint
themselves bosses in crises, and these
gather minions into sub-committees
they call the Directorate to collect water
bottles, flashlights, salty snacks, guns
and so on, and always righteous ones
who never relinquish their firearms
are called The Security, whose charge
is to remove hoarders and troublemakers
who resist order out to snowbanks
beyond the highway berm where the dead
and those soon to be dead are laid
to rest, though some always slip away
to trek their way past where the smashup
ends to seek succor from drivers jammed tight
yet cozy in warm cars—like bears
huddle in dens for the long winter wait--
until, even for them, lights will fail
and engines fall silent, so what can they do
but click-lock doors to conserve
what’s theirs when limping refugees press
frozen faces against their windows?
When the news helicopter chatters
above that long smear of veiled light
that twinkles like a heavenly Milky Way
on earth, flanked by bonfires flaring
in the cold clear night—like cannibal fires
sailors shuddered to behold, glowing
like holes in hell on the black hills
of Tierra del Fuego—while cell phones
flickered like lightning bug in rings
around them—like ancient Druids
in procession bearing torches
round a sacred fire—the newscaster
exults as the chopper hovers over
one communal blaze at an awful beauty
he beholds as the blades whirl aloft
a tornado of furious sparks and ashes.
everyone goes eighty. Of course,
there’s always one who doesn’t get it,
who goes slower when wind is blasting
sheets of snow across the highway,
a blinding veil called a white out,
while patches on asphalt as shiny black
as obsidian are called black ice.
The ten feet where side mirrors fail
to reflect, like how vampires vanish
in them—a little levity to lighten
the TED talk— is called the blind spot.
So boom. The sensation of powerlessness
when an SUV—neither a car nor a truck,
technically—spins around three times
three hundred and sixty degrees
like The Tornado ride at a county fair,
stifles breathe and puckers the butthole,
and yet feels hallowed, like awesome--
which is Edmund Burke’s description
of The Sublime—that is called a paradox.
More booms. Vehicles of all makes
and models, head-on or sideways, smack
into wrecks ahead; trucks jackknife,
but the thumps grow softer, more distant,
like how someone in a cozy bed
upstairs can hear bottles of green beer
popping their caps in the basement.
The white vapor rising is steam,
smelling like stale water in a rubber
hotwater bottle, while black smut
mixing amid flying snowflakes is smoke.
Always there are ones who appoint
themselves bosses in crises, and these
gather minions into sub-committees
they call the Directorate to collect water
bottles, flashlights, salty snacks, guns
and so on, and always righteous ones
who never relinquish their firearms
are called The Security, whose charge
is to remove hoarders and troublemakers
who resist order out to snowbanks
beyond the highway berm where the dead
and those soon to be dead are laid
to rest, though some always slip away
to trek their way past where the smashup
ends to seek succor from drivers jammed tight
yet cozy in warm cars—like bears
huddle in dens for the long winter wait--
until, even for them, lights will fail
and engines fall silent, so what can they do
but click-lock doors to conserve
what’s theirs when limping refugees press
frozen faces against their windows?
When the news helicopter chatters
above that long smear of veiled light
that twinkles like a heavenly Milky Way
on earth, flanked by bonfires flaring
in the cold clear night—like cannibal fires
sailors shuddered to behold, glowing
like holes in hell on the black hills
of Tierra del Fuego—while cell phones
flickered like lightning bug in rings
around them—like ancient Druids
in procession bearing torches
round a sacred fire—the newscaster
exults as the chopper hovers over
one communal blaze at an awful beauty
he beholds as the blades whirl aloft
a tornado of furious sparks and ashes.
