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Note
on
Car Drive
A
description of a simple act, a car drive by night, going home from a
visit, and I think it’s among the pretty good things I’ve done.
Usually mere observation is not enough:
Road gripped with frost, with scarce and flinty nails.
The engine purring, scorching at my shoes…,
but
it’s always a start and can be the essence.
Readers can bear the absence of august declamations about life,
e.g. at random, by Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida,
3. 3. 145:
Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion;
...
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d
As fast as they are made...
Without
pith of this kind most poems are incomplete, but not all.
Capturing the nature of an event without extrapolating from it a
moral of any kind, without even saying, except by implication, what that
nature amounts to, is not easy. Not
all events have an obvious curve with good places to begin and end. I struck lucky.
Switch off: the snow is dark, the night is deep.
Slam, lock the thing, go to the house and in.
This
is for those who have driven long-distance
nights. Catenary:
the curve formed by a hanging chain.
Alan
Marshfield
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