April 26: Driving After Supper
Martha
Driving After Supper
Marianne Boruch
The old senselessness returns
when driving in June
the ribbon roads, low corn
on either side, then woods, then meadows
where sheep just stand there,
slowly turn their heads. We are talking again
about how cool it is.
It could be Maine, I say
for the 20th time, though usually
this seems the other harder world—Indiana—
birds with their wait wait wait high
in trees, and such hot dust
when we stop, so studded with gravel.
We pass an old brick school—1880—
disguised as someone's house, the door open
to its ring of chairs
around the small TV, a blue jacket
hung on a hook. Gifts
at every moment, though not
the farmer, farther on,
out circling in his tractor
furious haywire turns, his wife
a thin shadow in the yard; nor the kid
at the next house who spits
on his knife, and lifts it up, quietly now
gouging the porch railing.
We barely see that, joy
being what it is, and the evening
so temporary.
----
For my kid, who loves cars the way I love poetry, and who wanted more poems with vehicles.
Poetry drive-thru menu:
2025: Butter, Olive Oil, Flour, Lucia Cherciu
2024: Origin Story, 1993, Adam Falkner
2023: For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut, Hanif Abdurraqib
2022: Demeter, Midwinter, Mairead Small Staid
2021: from A Pillow Book, Suzanne Buffam
2020: Letter to My Great, Great Grandchild, J.P. Grasser
2019: After the First Child, the Second, Mary Austin Speaker
2018: A New Lifestyle, James Tate
2017: Anchorage, Joy Harjo
2016: Poem to First Love, Matthew Yeager
2015: Ode to the Reel Mower, Jim Daniels
2014: So Much Happiness, Naomi Shihab Nye
2013: Habitation, Margaret Atwood
2012: About Marriage, Denise Levertov
2011: In Praise of My Bed, Meredith Holmes
2010: Black Swan, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
2009: In Me as the Swans, Leslie Williams
2008: Gnosticism V, Anne Carson
2007: American Names, Stephen Vincent Benet
2006: since feeling is first, e.e. cummings
2005: The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats