Driving Around at Night


And what about those streetlights
that flick off just as one beneath them passes,
sometimes afoot, sometimes adriving?
One smells it then, one's hair of the neck to full attention
doth rise, thinking, as the hair of one sometimes doth,
of perdition's choler, that peevish yellow light
summarily executed. One suspects conspiracy.

Worse though, the motion-activated dumb floods
one's oligarchical neighbors mount in profusion
round the walls of their estates, all they Mercedes
achtunging, they Hummers humming,
and, yikes, inside! Them umpteen beelzebubbish blue
diodes chiseling all the hours of a day
into hundreds of never slantable slivers...

Lo, one's ship is dark! The sea is forbidding!
One's astrolabe's ass-backwards, the sextant screwed up!
Mind you, even those constellations winkling above
might at their very sources be beshriven,
sucking back the darkness and swallowing the light. Therefore
one courses down the boulevards like a black heavy water,
faster and faster, hoping, above all, not to be seen.

- Robert Wrigley (from Gulf Stream Magazine)

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