November and this road’s tunnel
of soft fire draws you forward, as it descends,
as if you were moving toward
—radical completion,
some encompassment? Dark kindness
woven in the fabric of the afternoon.
And because you’ve held within your own veins
another passage of fire—obliterating mercy—
not these lit-up leaf-clouds
but a hot wire stealing into
the deepest chambers of the night—
you love the way the asphalt lifts
then hurries down toward Deep Lane.
The fire-road inside
is only that road once;
though desire sends you back there again
and again, it won’t be that one you’re on;
and thus you want all the harder.
So let this road take you,
autumn’s enchanted boy
lifted into the wet-yellow lamps of the maples;
taken up by that fleeting light,
let your trophies fall to the rain,
let the lean of the motorbike
carry you down the moraine,
across the rising chill from the fields, on into town:
warm light, voices, a meal in the tavern’s golden cave.
You won’t be riding that other road much again,
but this one: the kind man’s dark leather back
in front of you, the cycle’s center of gravity
sinking lower, the delicious clay-cold of the field
between here and home rising up, scent of hay,
of animals and ruin. He knows
you would just as soon stay,
but lucky he’s not here for that.
He ferries you home, maybe every night of your life.
Or that’s what you wish he could do,
though you know it’s you leaning against him
that makes your mutual direction.
Every night a little like the one he came home late,
happy, from the leather bar, and you in your welling up
out of sleep said, I have a lake in me,
and he looked at you closely, with a generous,
unflinching scrutiny, undeceived, loving, as clear a gaze
as anyone had ever brought to you, and he said, You do.