The Public Common

It's easy to be nostalgic for the past, of which we have relatively little data, if we're trying to picture life before the formation of our own brains.

Lately I've been thinking of Emily Dickinson: her biographers report that she read the newspapers and that the newspapers printed poetry. Dickinson even submitted poems for consideration, once, I believe. She was rejected and turned her back on all that. There came the famous poem about publication being the auction of the mind.

Oddly, there were poems in the newspaper (New York Times) last Sunday. The theme was: poems of the season. Were the editorial writers on vacation, so they dispatched the student intern to dig up some poetry?

My favorite was by Sarah Lindsay, a copy editor by day, whose poems normally are third-person, fantastical, a combination of research and wildly detailed invention. So I was surprised to see this straightforward first person elegy, built on the platform of an extended metaphor. In technical terms, the poem is all vehicle (ha ha); the ground of the metaphor, the real death, is stated but not dwelt on. I found it haunting because it is so directly stated, the scene so vivid.

THE DRIVER

Twice we watched him leave us:
Once when the car loaded with us died
and rolled to the side of a highway into Nashville
in boiling August; later with cancer.
Empty jug in one hand, he walked away
step by step on a strip of pavement
about as wide as his shoulders,
hot wind of traffic panting on his left.
He would find help. He would attract it. Slowly
the rippling heat from the asphalt dissolved him,
his shrinking back looked like anyone’s —
he was gone before it disappeared.
We stood staring anyway
by the highway barrier wall
with mimosa tree-tips reaching over
as the other cars rushed by us
toward their accidents at a hundred miles an hour.