The Conductors, Kate Worman-Becker

Driving Through the Darkness

        eloquence … stimulates all the rest … Emerson

Driving through the darkness alone

evening waited for your words to fill it

like the parched night waited for wetness to scatter

the lights of the city onto everything—

puddles, pavement, metal, window-glass, signs.

I’m hearing echoes of phrases. Impressions of things said

a cadence, a statement that repeats in my head

loosing myself in the charge of street- and tail-light—

pulsing fragments that stir the ember city.

Clear now of clouds, the moon—

that perfect silver pond of elements—

pulls my eyes up to the sky.

I don’t want to stop looking at it.

Though the road begs for my attention,

it hangs in my black eyes. It connects straight to my heart.

But I must drive on through the darkness alone.

Alone at certain times the streets at night are straighter and longer,

lonelier, and yet a place of strange contentment.

In your car, you are like the Sadhu in his cave

a wise and a mad man with an emergency brake for staff

cup holder for water vessel, dash for alter

moonlight and fluorescent for ash.

But any vehicle is just a bed in motion—

a place to position your thoughts and head—

always trying to understand how you got there again

where you’re going and how fast you can get back

to work or idleness in the end.

We are all vessels spread out in the hollow of night

dreaming unaccompanied, birthing by oneself, dying on our own.

Without looking honestly through the dark

without feelings to fuel or connections to make—we are only corpses.

Do not deny the Bast that sits by your side.

Grab a portion of the moon and put it in your pocket

to pull out when the light is low.

Prod those stubborn genes when they resist.

Your illuminating words can, and do, move the night.

Anita Stienstra