Driving Westward By Virginia Hamilton Adair

Age, grief, perversities

of lovers and investments

vanish in the exhalation

of our speed or, hydrocarbon

ghosts, hover beyond tinted glass.

Points of departure and destination

are folded away in paper maps

when we enter the 4-lane fairyland

swinging like bells

for some nameless jubilee.

Who has not known as driver

before the bright controls

this hubris of the freeway

this rapture of the horizontal

plunge into receding sanity?

Here at our slightest touch

musicians hanging in the wind

spend, spend their sweetness

into our cells of chrome and foam

our lives their opera.

The slow God shepherding

his clouds across blue pastures

dissolves before our eyes

the land unrolls like doomsday

and all our coffins fly into the sun.

From “Ants on the Melon” by Virginia Hamilton Adair (The Modern Library: 64 pp., $12.95 paper)