Kathleen Taylor

"Evening Drive"

My hair was damp.
I ventured out anyway
to the greasy doughnut shop next door,
slotted too many coins into the soda machine.
I decided to take a drive and
on the cassette
Lou and Nico talked to me of the gritty streets of New York,
of German angst,
of drugs and love.
Driving on dark country roads through towns that night,
oddity felt as memories flooded and future reared up ahead.
When I got to the corner near the diner that we always used to haunt,
I did feel sadness.
All-night sessions of coffee and fruit pie,
the bleary-eyed waitresses,
the machine that dispensed bright bouncing balls for a quarter.
I probably won’t go there again.
I don’t allow myself caffeine after five.
I could’ve sworn I saw fireworks
low in the sky behind the empty supermarket,
green around the edges and red in the middle,
but I saw no more.
Perhaps it was hallucinatory,
the first symptom of Van Gogh-ian schizophrenia.
This street wound through a woods
devoid of leaves and full of deer,
Halloween trees reaching across the roof of my rusty little car,
and past the speedway junkyard,
then
too soon back home.
Drizzling sprinkles subsided.
Mr. Reed paused in the middle of explaining how everything is just dirt.
Ordinary again,
tiny apartment with ugly carpet,
alone but for a temperamental Calico cat.