Interstate 95 - A Winter Advisory
Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 9:35 pm
Interstate 95 - A Winter Advisory
Returning to you it took four and a half hours
just to reach the New Jersey Turnpike
in traffic that log-jammed,
the worst in living memory. On Interstate 95
a Mack truck jack-knifed on the ice,
its cab and left wheels scrunched like cardboard
into the cement barrier. I worked the stick shift
from first to second to first again through the rubber-neck
of a five lane highway and listened to FM 92.
Finally, I tired of jingles
and attended to car-humming silences.
I had expected more impatience, more horns
and short-fused tempers, but we each slouched
and shunted another slow yard, forced to accept
the inconvenient consequences of
freezing rain slicking into ice sheets over greying asphalt.
Sitting through New York’s clotted traffic,
within the slow flowing silence (as trucks, Cadillacs,
Chevys and the odd peacock-flaunting Corvette
lurched forward), becomes a moment of attending
to the demands of summations and decisions;
but I can only attempt coalescences.
I returned to you
and to Christmas cards,
greeting me with the joy and peace of the season;
but whom they greet
has become a stranger even to himself.
Perhaps, as within the flump and flow of traffic,
and, as within the slump and suck of blood,
the self, too, lurches forward,
not by decision, but by
attending to inevitabilities.
Returning to you it took four and a half hours
just to reach the New Jersey Turnpike
in traffic that log-jammed,
the worst in living memory. On Interstate 95
a Mack truck jack-knifed on the ice,
its cab and left wheels scrunched like cardboard
into the cement barrier. I worked the stick shift
from first to second to first again through the rubber-neck
of a five lane highway and listened to FM 92.
Finally, I tired of jingles
and attended to car-humming silences.
I had expected more impatience, more horns
and short-fused tempers, but we each slouched
and shunted another slow yard, forced to accept
the inconvenient consequences of
freezing rain slicking into ice sheets over greying asphalt.
Sitting through New York’s clotted traffic,
within the slow flowing silence (as trucks, Cadillacs,
Chevys and the odd peacock-flaunting Corvette
lurched forward), becomes a moment of attending
to the demands of summations and decisions;
but I can only attempt coalescences.
I returned to you
and to Christmas cards,
greeting me with the joy and peace of the season;
but whom they greet
has become a stranger even to himself.
Perhaps, as within the flump and flow of traffic,
and, as within the slump and suck of blood,
the self, too, lurches forward,
not by decision, but by
attending to inevitabilities.
. All too familiar a scene, I must say... very interesting the way you made use of your time and thoughts, both then and now, in relation to it all. Kudos. 
.