Listen, it will be all right. I’ll drive. Good-bye
Maxwell Street, we’ll say as if we had a secret
emergency, good-bye Bendix spin-dryer, good-bye
petticoats on the line dripping liquid starch.
What’s the right phrase you’ve been looking for
all these years, spitting your morning phlegm?
I think it’s Fluid Drive, that revolutionary automatic
kick of the DeSoto into third gear at 45. Exempt
at last from the science of shifting that makes us
both weep! I can get this thing up to 70, flat,
in the stretch by the agri farm—
used to scare starlings out of trees doing that.
They lift up now, brittle as leaves as we pass,
get past. “Your Father—,” you start in as if he were
in the trunk, but then you open a Pepsi. We are
watching him dry up and die away like an argument.
You have worn your pink flowered shorts
and it is as cool as the basement on a hot day,
and Arthur Godfrey has not yet fired Julius La Rosa.
It is as if we are down there listening to the radio,
knees pulled up on the brand-clean chenille bedspread.
We are going through Ladies’ Home Journals and you
are a beauty queen, safe in your vault of clichés,
safe from having to explain anything you mean.