Sometimes my wife assigns me poems.
You have perhaps read some of them
if you have ever read me before.
Today she asked for a driveway poem,
possibly in an effort
to call my attention to the driveway’s disrepair, its weedy
cracks, the holes that fill with rain.
Consequently, I am sitting with notebook
and a beer in a plastic chair in the drive
beneath the overhanging mulberry
and apple trees. Looking up, I can see
the blue jays’ abandoned nest and a few
late mulberries hanging on. Otherwise,
the driveway’s purple with them.
We talk sometimes of redoing the drive
with either brick or asphalt (cheaper)—
this stretch of concrete where balls
were kicked or dribbled, our feet
leaving its pocked surface for effortless
lay-ups, where the girls played four-square
and hopscotch, skated or rode bikes
down its slight decline through apple shadow.
It’s here when small they threw the I Ching
with ball and jacks, sat chalking pictures
the rain washed away. It was here
the Mother-May-I game heard round the world
was played, and here one October
the good witch was saved from burning.
It was here someone was granted the serenity
to accept what could not be changed,
and here a Northwest Passage to the backyard
sought during the great blizzard of ’78.
Upon this oil-stained surface we invented
fanfaronade, first danced the fandango,
debunked phallocentrism, witnessed
the birth of the blues, waved lonesome
farewells to those who would not return.
Notice our driveway’s gentle curves,
its willingness to offer itself
as means, as end, as pubescent
proving ground, heresiarchic haven . . .
how naturally the snarled garden hose
finds a home here, how sturdily
the ladder rises from this firmness
toward the always disappointing gutters.
* * *
My wife will be back soon, pulling up
until she reaches my chair and empty
bottle, but I am finished anyway,
poetry having done what poetry
can sometimes do: fixing in the mind
what is fixed nowhere else.