Tomber (note book poem)

April 24, 1977

The night bends softly around a single glowing headlight approaching me in the dark, misaimed, with its partner extinguished and invisible in the night, staggering like a drunk over pothole, an unpredictable advancing stranger along unpredictable roads I must drive.

The drizzle makes it hard to see, dots of wet against the windshield as a drive, tapping on the glass between each wiper swipe, turning the dark world into smears through which nothing is certain.

And when the approaching headlight passes, and the car to which it is attached, gone, then comes darkness, and the moan of tires against the rough road, a wail of rubber against asphalt I feel in my bones, followed by singing as the tires mount the honey-combed surface of an expansion bridge, a bridge only barely visible with rusted arms rising along either side.

It stretches on endlessly, as if the steel was rubber pulled too tight, ready to break somewhere in the dark ahead.

My headlights illuminate nothing but a brown reflection, as if I am driving a boat along a river in the dark, and I am a drunken sailor, feeling the slosh of wet flowing up and over me, drowning me in a flood of feelings I can’t quite describe.

I think of you, like the missing headlight on the car I have just passed, leaving me half blind and alone, my moans matching the moan of the tires as I plunge ahead, without real direction, somehow knowing that I don’t know what I need to know most, feeling my way west to where you might be, feeling the tug of wind against the car steering me -- if not away then to one side, against the rusted arches that holds up this bridge, threatening to plunge me into the abyss beyond, with fingers clutching the wheel to keep moving straight, to ride through this  dark world, this endless passage, with the vain hope I will end up in your heart.