— for Kathleen Daniel
After
my treatment, I
squirmed in the
seat of my Bronco, speeding
(so fast the wheel
shook) along the I-95
overpass. Below
me Baltimore’s
buildings looked like
tiles pressed into
a brown mosaic. I want
to be able to say
that in weak
twilight the Chesapeake
wavered like a shadow,
flat and blue, but
that’s a different
story. Here,
where the traffic
of language is
snarled,
there is only this
image: a whelming
cloud of smoke as
large as an apple
held out at arm’s
length, in the
open
distance I was driving
towards.
An hour
before I saw it, my
acupuncturist
twisted two needles into
my Heavenly Pillar, a
point
of courage
in the burdened
muscles between
the shoulders. (Highways
have shoulders, too,
but that’s a digression,
and this story’s still
got wheels.) I
couldn’t see
the needles, but
if auto-
biography was written
in third-person
omniscient, I
would say “They quaked
whenever he fidgeted, twin
temporary temples
erected to heal
his heart.”
I can
say they didn’t hurt.
I slept, and dreams
impressed my flesh
(there’s no other way
to tell it) till
nothing I’d ever learned
still mattered, or made
sense. I woke up
lost, a ghost
town in my spine,
then left Edgewater’s
center—its gray
boat shops and liquor
stores, its clusters of
mortgaged
homes huddled
against past
hurricanes, its
scrawny farms and
strict but untidy
brick-and-mortar churches—
for anywhere else.
Again
the smoke, the
fire underneath
it, some
stranger’s Everything
transformed into
the terrible
gaseous Nothing
everyone’s body
houses. All
down the road,
the congregated
drivers performed the
rite of rubber-
necking. Children in hot
back seats played peek-a-
boo with their distracted
parents, truckers lit
smokes, and cellular
phones broadcast the
disaster.
So this
is the story of
how we all
kept driving,
the story
of stories, of
highways
with infinite
shoulders. I-
95 dipped
down toward the Inner
Harbor, yawn
after yawn erupted
from my lungs, and
deep inside the
rubble of my
ribs, my
pulse sought
rhythm.
