IN MOTION

.
fugue
.
you see them vanish in their speeding cars,
the many people hastening through the world,
and wonder what they would have done before
this time of time speed distance, random streams
of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
was there never a world where people just sat still?
.
yet they might be all of them contemplatives
of a timeless now, drivers and passengers
in the moving cars all facing to the front
which is the future, which is destiny,
which is desire and desire's end -
what are they doing but just sitting still?
.
and still at speed they fly away, as still
as the road paid out beneath them as it flows
moment by moment into the mirrored past;
they spread in their wake the parading fields of food,
the windowless works where who is making what,
the grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done.
(by howard nemerov)
.
.
like trains of cars on tracks of plush
.
like trains of cars on tracks of plush
i hear the level bee --
a jar across the flowers goes
their velvet masonry --
.
withstands until the sweet assault
their chivalry consumes --
while he, victorious tilts away
to vanquish other blooms.
(by emily dickinson)
.
.
jump cabling
.
when our cars touched
when you lifted the hood of mine
to see the intimate workings underneath,
when we were bound together
by a pulse of pure energy,
when my car like the princess
in the tale woke with a start,
i thought why not ride the rest of the way together.
(by linda pastan)
.
.
sonnet IV
.
up at his attic sill the south wind came
and days of sun and storm but never peace.
along the town's tumultuous arteries
he heard the heart-throbs of a sentient frame:
each night the whistles in the bay, the same
whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars:
for smoke that half obscured, the circling stars
burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame.
up to his attic came the city cries --
the throes with which her iron sinews heave --
and yet forever behind prison doors
welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes
the light that hangs on desert hills at eve
and tints the sea on solitary shores. . .
(by alan seeger)
.
.