Devil's Playground at sunset ...
And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin Light snow torn Under wheels, The car bang metally grenading, and then the wood poles, Whipping, loom-
I have always wanted to sing a song of praise
For the unscathed: myself Stepping from the fractured car whose black axle's one inch From gone; the slim pole
Slicing cable up to sheet metal, Seat foam, corduroy (Like butter, the mechanic will later tell me Poking a stiff finger through the cloth), to pierce the exact point
I was supposed to sit, stopping Because praise begins where pain Transfigures itself, Stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I Transfigure myself from driver
To survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure
Bolting up and opening her eyes. Here are the thousand wrecks From a life configured in snow before me: myself At five, pulled from the burning car seat; At twelve, bleeding from the scalp After the car threw me From my bike; at fourteen, Tumbling over the slick hood rushing.
Sockets of windows with glass Bashed out in a translucent toothy ring; lights And bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer Gravitationally hurled through the windshield; Brakes given out; and worse, The icy loops of road, the trucker's Sixteen fat wheels squealing-
All the ways technology should have killed me
And didn't! Praise for my death-hungry luck! And all the manner in which I've almost failed it- Marriage lost, Buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude At the Greyhound station Knowing no one to retrieve me, Carless among the others pressed tight To their own disaster or boredom: unbearably young mothers,
Drifters, boy soldiers Shoulder to shoulder with the insance, weaving The same thread of conversation between ourselves. How
Could this happen to me At this age, at this stage, how Did I not notice, and will you put this seat up? And will you lend me this quarter? And will you call me a back when we get home?
The young man in the seat in front of me, head Full of zigzagging tight braids says Sure you can dig that ballot box up And while you're at it look up all the bones Buried in the Everglades, repeats it
For the amusement of his neighbor Who knows a lost cause when she sees it, And when we pass my accident on the road, points And whistles at the car, the broken poles, Snickers, Bet you no one walked away from that one.
For this, and for all these things: praise
To the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled Like a length of rime-colored rope, the snow Colors broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape itself Takes on a nuclear glow, so bright
We have to shield our eyes from it. Praise For myself playing at morbidity because I thought I had a right to it,
As if flesh had to follow spirit To such a pure depth the bones themselves Could not rest but must be broken, nerves Singed then ripped out, the heart clench madly in its chest. As if
A mouth had nothing better to do Than chew on itself, and I had nothing Except this white earth, This smashed car to praise
What I knew before and know Even better now: the hills Cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise To my youth and to my age,
Praise to my ambition and to my small-mindedness, Praise to my self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise For the splinters of delight that can pierce it. Praise for wood pole, praise for foam. Praise for blood and praise for bone.
The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse's table.
And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by, The light of us a wash of gold illuminating Bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming
Like my heart here on this earth, Bloody, and still beating.
Contents Copyright 2001, National Public Radio
