six

It is my habit to drive away the stress, frustration, fear, ache, and pain with my car. I don't know if I drive it away or drive away from it, but I drive big circles around the hills West of town and when I come back to where I started, I feel better, purged, painless or close to it, and emptied of all the shit I don't want in me. For a time, it works, and I can write. Tonight, I drove through the hills in the pouring rain, listened to The Tallest Man On Earth, whose "I Won't Be Found" is my favorite song ever right now, and wrote this poem:

Before I thought it would, early this evening, winter's night came. It came black and reflective as wet road; night like obsidian mirror under obscure basalt sky. It rained and the rain was small and slow and moved in and out of itself; fell now left, now right, now down, now up, fluid fog of pinprick drop and floating, podlike puddle. I rolled glossy tires quick across pavement, they picked up water, piped it through their cracks and crevices and dropped it back in pavement's cracks and crevices same. They drove me into darker, blacker night and wound me through hill and tree until, with soundless pop, the sky was burned and lit electric; I thought lightning, but the sky sustained its silver singing. For the moon had calmly rent the sky and shone its silver self through blackened clouds. (Illusion, then, was all throughout this night: earlier or later I saw faint and dainty deer walk through wire fence as though through air or open door.) Sky hung slightly more bright then, a luminous brushed steel moonshine blue, and hung more lightly then, over heavy hanging hill, also blue, but different blue, blacker blue, blue the color green is when one puts away light and pulls blanket over head; hill and sky had hung and swum as one in dark black depth but now were separate, the former sunken, black still and hanging heavilier, the latter lighter, brighter and buoyant in inclusive sea of fog. I was held, then, foot on brake, window down to show my face to fog and to face the fog. Like tiny tongues of packs of tiny dogs, this way that way water lapped at lips, cheeks, eyes and lashes; I pushed lids closed and breathed the black sky and silver fog to the still darker depth of lung and listened to pitter patter splashes, miniscule collisions on metal, glass, rubber, road, skin, hair, and wool. I watched faint deer pass through silver wire; saw hard and heavy flesh, bone, and fur transit silent sharp and stark metal. Eyes like black and heavy hills the feet of silver moonshine peaks shone from faint deer's face, and without slightest sound, saw through crushing, pressing fog, through wire fence and rainslicked road, through window glass and pouring rain, through my dark eyes and bone behind, through cover of cloud and thick black hill, and shone, two tiny pinprick drops, two round podlike puddles, through early winter's night. Moonlight disappeared with a silent bang and dark black sky spread instant over and through heavy hill. I watched the transit through the rain: Last hind hoof broke seamlessly through thin wire, prick of flitting tail flashed, long brown face turned away to face wind and driving fog; and finally, faint deer flesh bounced once into dark black sky and either held there, or did not.