I sit in a new Ford,
my hands on the wheel.
Scent of leather & perfumed oil.
Through its tinted windshield,
past a bay window, birds
silhouette a powerline,
maybe a hundred starlings,
until I blink: I'm in the car-wash,
pushed or pulled along,
no need to steer
through the sudsy light.
Rubber leaves appear
from everywhere at once, then
toucans & birds of paradise
in streaks of flight; soon,
one huge flamingo glistening
on my hood.... Tell me, pal,
if these are forms
of compensation for the world
lost in our exhaust,
what's next? The mind's
eye in our heart won't
always remember, will it?...
From this carrel
I study condors released
back into wilderness winds
from which they'd disappeared
after millions of years--
my mind seems to soar
over mountain valleys
with clouds & raptors.
Gene-mote cars stream
capillary highways clogged
with roadkill, but a feathery
spray of wax & I'm
released to the travel dream
we didn't invent & can't
quite
seem to claim,
for human time to come.
William Heyen has had poems
in recent issues of Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review,
Ohio Review, Ontario Review, Coffee House I (England), and Maverick
(online). A story, "The Babies," appears in the current
issue of Witness. His books Erika and The Host: Selected Poems
are in print with Time Being Books; Crazy Horse in Stillness--winner
of 1997's Small Press Book Award for Poetry--and Pig Notes &
Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry are published by BOA. He lives in
Brockport, New York.
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