I’m so sorry, I wanted to comfort you
!50!sitting there in the Anchor Auto lot,
one headlight hanging loose, the other
!50!smashed in under the up-crumpled hood.
I wanted to say goodbye as if you were
!50!a lunged animal, a creature of hoof
or paw, who had a skull crushed in, not
!50!a radiator. And I felt responsible
because you were mine, because I was the one
!50!who made you spend your last good day
with the windshield wipers on, eight hours
!50!in the rain from Geneva, New York
to the end of the earth, where I was returning
!50!ten years later, and just forty minutes
from there, a fast highway exit, some traffic
!50!backed up, a chorus line of brake lights
rippling back to me too fast and I smashed
!50!your stop pedal to the floor, but it just
wasn’t enough. And I hate it when things
!50!aren’t enough, which seems to happen
quite a lot of the time. Here, perhaps
!50!I’m more keen to the feeling, since
this is where I came to mourn my beloved
!50!who went missing, and for all I did, and
all his brother did, and for all the police
!50!did, and the Congresspeople and
Senators, not a trace of him was found. And I tried
!50!to rescue his daughter, and though
I can give her a roof, an allowance,
!50!someone to talk to, a kept promise,
I cannot give her what she needs, the
!50!childhood she never really had.
I buy her new jeans, she shows up
!50!in the same patched sweatpants, says
this is what anarchy looks like. Okay,
!50!I say, whatever frosts your cupcake,
and I really, really want to mean it,
!50!just as I really, really want to
mean it when I tell a student I don’t
!50!take their angry email personally.
It’s never enough, though I test my blood
!50!for sugar all day long, let the doctors
workshop my days, consider my body,
!50!there is no cure for the disease I cannot
remember living without, nor the fears
!50!that are, for me, its worst complication.
And these things, and the trying-to-make-
!50!ends-meet which is also somehow
never quite enough (because one month
!50!there’s a water leak driving up the bill,
the next my daughter pulls off the handle
!50!of you, the little silver car, because
the door was iced shut and she didn’t
!50!realize). And there’s the psychological
warfare of politicians whom I resist but
!50!letterhead stationary, early phone calls
might as well be burnt as offerings
!50!in my bathtub, pleas ashing in my mouth.
I was driving you far from the bills
!50!and the clamor of everybody’s panic
so I could return to this desolate place where
!50!I listen to the sand blown up on the street
grind beneath my feet as I stride the ocean-
!50!side blocks of town, or the waves
shushing up into the breakwater. It’s bleak
!50!here, austere in my favorite ways,
and it calms me. When I drove out here ten
!50!years ago, grieving, guilt-winnowed, nerves
shrill with a singular purpose – it was to finish
!50!a conversation that had ended
before it was over for me, to write the rest
!50!of my own side, to say goodbye
and maybe that’s why I’ve been having
!50!such confusing dreams. The smells
of salt-brined cedarwood and new lilac
!50!remind me in ways I am not full-aware
that there’s some symmetry here, in this
!50!fearful motion from then to now.
My future husband tells me I am not a bad
!50!person for having had a car wreck
and my sister tells me I am not a bad person
!50!for having a future husband now,
and I know they’re both telling me the truth.
!50!But another truth is this: I am not good
at saying goodbye. So I cry, and I founder
!50!and the nice man at Anchor Auto says,
It’s okay. We develop relationships with cars.
!50!And I’m reminded of an old IKEA ad,
anthropomorphizing a lamp left stooped
!50!in a rainy gutter while the new one glows
in a cozy window and then a guy with a German
!50!accent says, The lamp has no feelings –
And for a moment I feel humor as relief. Still,
!50!this car brought me into my own future
many times. You brought me here, and back
!50!and forth to the retinal specialist in Utah
and out of Utah, when a whiskey-ed up man
!50!said to me the cruelest things I’d ever heard –
I drove with my Dad, and we ate off paper bags
!50!in our laps – cheeseburgers – and talked
and you brought me to a new job at a steepled
!50!brick university, despite the snows –
Thank you, for giving me some freedom
!50!at times when I needed it most. Thanks
for helping me to get away, when away
!50!is where I needed to be. And thank you
for, in the end, bringing me home safely,
!50!for taking that final blow, so I did not.