Dangers

From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs,

Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong

To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune;

But ever the classicist:

in swimming lessons, slowest to learn;

In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious

In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy

Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances;

But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still

And adjuring others to go slow

until we leapt forward that night out of control

And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford

While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din

And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming

And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek.

Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike.

What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox

Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE,

then darkness rolling inside;

Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light,

So even now I think we might have turned:

smart with his hands,

There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines,

Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate

Into a marshy cornfield

or up a logging road into a hillside wood.

At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment

Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on.

I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space,

In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness.

They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God.

They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws,

Only the threads upbone keep stripping

so they have to operate

Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really,

Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room,

I think too much of my own will

implicated in that dragging brace.

Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full

Of muscle, plastic, and bone

is coordinated by nerves even the

Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault,

But even in such talk,

grace occurs as an accident someone caused.

If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities,

There is another thing

articulated in the scars that saved her face—

And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to

Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.

Source: Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989)