JERRY #9

Eileen G'Sell

Impervious to Avalanche

Waiting for light to shake
only always

would we smile, you ask
whether I know the way

that Archimedes died,
time’s impatient blade

obeyed, not proof enough
for Leibniz. I wish to sleep

in perfect snow, die of sweet
collision, halfway to a heavy sky

and infinitely held. You say
you think I’d live through this,

you love as though it’s proven.
An excavated craving

for precision keeps me warm.
We curve as though

contrived of light, climb
as though it cures us.

Only and always hidden
blind, with sturdy shovel lifted.

Drive

the birth of an engine soft in your ears embellishing its provenance, a starless past that proves irredeemably forgone; orange moon, safe hands, a sudden pedal swooning; a shift into someplace dark, sincere, a solid daring duty. when else does the soul go slack, slick its bangs straight back to see? what right have we right now to say that time takes sides to taunt us? to hear the stir of a suburu and call it to the night, to steer the heart with a hardened palm and quantify its relevance, to stake one’s claim on an unpaved place and pray that it is worth it—isn’t this what the wonderful women who didn’t raise us were always raving about? this leather and heat and soft seat wishing, this rain and a midday singing so long, this more than 3,000 miles more than alaska more than my mother; this drivetrain talent for transaxle searching, this engine turning and turning again, this torque approach to front-wheel living I was never your slushbox beautiful nothing I was agency movement clutch clutch clutch I was 500 hp gold and you know it the place it was I came from on that deathless night I came