Sunday morning melancholy: awake too early with Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Sappho, and now I'm getting that old the-past-is-too-much-with-me feeling again.

Accident Report

Dawn Potter

You know how it is:

tires devouring the coiled road,

one hand on the wheel, bending left,

bending right, slick as a seal; one of those

dawns when grains of fog spatter your windshield

like handfuls of sand, when a monstrous owl drifts

from the invisible forest with a rat writhing in his claws;

when a half-grown buck, leaf-drunk, vaults across the sopping

tarmac like a prince under enchantment; and “Whoso list to hunt,

I know where is an hind!” you cry, but silently, of course, because . . .

because you’re ashamed to mouth a greater poet’s borrowed trappings;

you, with no rights in the matter, mere remote control in fog, ambivalent,

wishful, and cold as well; for all the heat’s in words you were afraid to sing

in earshot of these phantoms—Wyatt, Milton—floating in the vinyl shade,

ready to taunt your match-struck quavering flame. You, not man enough

to warble to an empty car; they, so long dead, still young: still flashing

their brash “So help me, God, an immortality of fame.” They played

their necessary cards: not only intellect and drudgery and grief,

wordy sleight-of-hand and rage and loving, probing curiosity,

but plain obnoxious gall. A poem, a stiletto in the back.

And you, alone and lonely, in your blundering car,

afraid of some fool prince with the temerity

to leap into your high-beam’s timid dark.

As if that murky light could be his star.

[first appeared in Locuspoint (2011); forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2013)].