Pratik Current Issue HIGHLIGHT: American poet, SYDNEY LEA's new poem, "Tricky Road at Night"

 

SYDNEY LEA

Tricky Road at Night

My radio’s crackle sounds

like judgment on me for driving

mud roads in this stiff rain. 

As your own life changes, so

must your life insurance change,

some huckster’s voice insists.

I thump the tuner and hear

–from who knows where?– the gravel

rant of a Gospel zealot:

Tell me, brothers and sisters,

ain’t you a long ways from home?

Amens resound. I’m moved,

a bit strangely.

                             My prospect’s blurred

by  mist and steamed-up glass.

My life could be snipped like a thread.

Young spring, ice still in the ditches

on the old McHenry Turnpike,

once a thoroughfare

as busy as any here.

I drop into Cummings Hollow.

In mind, the word protracts

itself into echo. Hollow. 

How sinners must feel when they change

their road! I imagine the tears.

As a college kid, I camped

nearby.

                             Oh, aroma of liquor!

Oh, love and promise: the girl,

the flagon of rotgut wine!

She was sweet, the young woman, the drink

seemed endless, and late at night,

our minuscule tent gone calm,

I projected a vibrant future:

placidity and excitement

in welcome alternation.                       

Like elixir, those youthful thoughts.

Now I’m here in an actual future.

My headlights sweep an old dump,

where a gutted, antique Victrola

looks ready

                             to offer up song;

a spavined Buick juts

over the shoulder, as if

it might suddenly take to the highway;

rain-slicked bottles wink

at my creeping pickup’s headlights;

dead shovels lie next to dead barrels;

a rat scats hole to hole.

I can even make out some shears,

gleaming, open-jawed.

They seem to me metaphors–

for something. I’ve driven through

a thousand thousand lives,

                             not one of them insured.

 

 

Sydney Lea is a former poet laureate of Vermont. Founder and longtime editor of New England Review, Lea has published thirteen volumes of poetry (most recently Here, Four Way Books, 2019), a novel, five collections of personal essays, and three critical books. He lately collaborated on a book of essays with former poet laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, and will soon present The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic narrative poem with  James Kochalka, Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate. He and his successor as state poet, Chard de Niord, co-edited the authoritative anthology of Vermont poets, Roads Taken.

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