ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
SELECTIONS
FROM MY DRIVE
by Reamy Jansen



1.

Which starts where? Now? 1949? Let's say now,
for the present.
Going North, going back not quite
as often.
The drive to school. I love going to school, usually.
My first ride to school I can't exactly remember.
But my father would always walk me to the end
of the block, where the small, yellow bus waited.
I would get on, sit by the window, look out
and vanish into the glass for the day.
I think my father would sometimes hold my hand
before I got on. I don't remember the drive back

2.

10 and 2

The alley out is a narrow parallel
sometimes turned terrifying parallax
Gabriel tells me to hold the wheel
at ten and two, a time telling
golden section, an open symmetry,
degrees on a blue protractor.
My course on Forest Street is splashed
with pink cherry and white linden petals
flicked from the brushes of their branches

4.

Up

On the way up to school I do my dream work,
thinking of vowels, long a's, hard e's, musical
intervals, open fifths of voluntaries, Handel's
steady steps in "a highway to," the octave
and seventh of "Bali Hi," and the verb is,
not to be, but is. But on the bus I could only think
of being home

6.

Work I Have Not Seen

The mowers have been busy
or perhaps it's unfair to say
the mowers. All that I know is that
the wildflower gardens past
the second toll have been cut down,
leaving a brown absence, dirt
not earth, leaving slight rows as regular
as a price code.
Lost are: bee balm and bergamot
painted trillium and downy gentian
and fox glove and wild geraniums
grape-hyacinth and larkspur and
evening primrose
Black-eye Susans
butter and eggs

19.

Deaths On The Road

Most are on the way south, the way
back. Two have struck monstrous granite
outcroppings thinking they were the exit.
In one of the medians someone has just
died or been killed and now deflated balloons
wilting blooms and rain-dulled bows are
widely broadcast from the verge to a final
bleaching red heart tied to a white birch
in the darkest part of the wood.
More than one or two have died here.
Later, the spring mowers in machines
school-bus yellow
have cut down swept away
the wreath by the road

FROM 'VERGES,'
PART TWO OF DRIVEWAYS

In the Middle

For me, it was a short, unbalanced trek up a grassy swale, the green sides steep enough to keep urging me down into a wet, spongy center, but then succeeded by an inviting stand of trees--ash, hickory, Norway maples--nourished by a small brook. The trees, however, were made almost unapproachable by a glossy bib of poison ivy, which one of my handbooks tells me is a by-product of "disturbed land." As a child I could run through this ivy without a care, but this time I step between the triple leaves like some cautious blue heron, as my earliest memory of my father was of him sitting in a brown, split-wicker chair while oozing from the pustules caused by contact. It seemed he never moved for the week and just kept getting sadder. The stuff would weep onto the newspaper below him, so I step carefully now and make it into the darkened woods.

So this place is hard to get to, unless of course you're heading to your death. Then, it's a simple, slight slip of the wheel, the vehicle guiding you between two metal barriers, each the size and length of playground slides turned on their sides. Then you're into the trees, saplings and vines first, the toughter stuff farther down, you learning too late that you're mortal, the passengers, you, teens, of course, all noir scream masks, if you see them through the windshield, praying, if that's what you'd call it, to keep the inside inside, the outside out, fingers splayed in fear, radiating five points, then ten, then multiples, whitening, and now pale constellations perhaps their parents will name stars after, which you can do, for just $39.95 per star, each dead so long ago, but which you can manage on the other galaxy, the Internet. But you're still going, perhaps fifty, sixty feet stopped finally by two white pines that just won't move aside, the car molting side view mirrors, bits of grill, the bumper, the entire front window, and, finally, fenders and hood, gray the color of a dead sea lion, and as smooth, now, while I'm there, with just a slight red, brown streak of rust. Other things kept flying into the larger radius, the speakers coming out of the door, and from the back seat, playing cards, the jack of hearts ducking under a leaf, three sides of a cigar box going the greater distance, the kind of thing you asked your grandfather for, where you kept an empty shotgun shell, perhaps a live .22 round(long rifle), the lost skins of cicadas, bottle tops, the shell of a circus turtle, a marble swirling with milk and color, a cat's eye, and now maybe you use the box to keep other things, maybe that's why it's in the car instead of in the closet.

One son died here--it's in script in silver, plastic letters, "Son"--but it's hard to imagine that there weren't others who joined him in what is now a clearing, flying three American flags, sporting nine drying bouquets, four wreaths and a large plastic shamrock. The car blazed a trail the width of a service road, one that you could easily follow, if you had a mind to.

To get back to my car, which is parked suspiciously in a new development filled with ersatz French provincial houses that fool nobody and lawns the color of anti-depressants, I take another way out, crossing the brook where it's become a freshet, but there's little poison ivy here, just a fringe and then up a steep bank to the side of the highway. My foolish laces have come undone and I'm afraid to touch them. I walk along the side, south toward the oncoming traffic.

Et arcadia ego. You don't need to tell me. I know.