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Last Kiss

The rearview mirror framed my father's eyes.

The Oldsmobile's high-domed ceiling,
Simpler than heaven, contained a single light,
In the unambiguous center.

I often touched that ceiling with my fingers.
Its spongy slip-cover fabric wasn't thick –
I got to unyielding hardness right away.

(I stood on the seat to touch it. We climbed and played
At fifty miles an hour unconscious of peril,
young sailors on a lurching deck.)

The asymmetrical road, favoring the left,
My father's side, made immaculate sense of the landscape,
Simple as a rook's move – any distance, one direction.

And he preferred whatever came on
To changing a station. We were out on a date
In my daddy's car / We hadn't driven very far.

That summer we heard that same song over and over,
A lugubrious, gothic teenage car-crash ballad.
We hushed in the back seat and listened.

Sometimes driving at night we had to turn
The dome light on to find a map, but that
Turned all the windows suddenly into mirrors.

John M. Anderson learned to write poetry in the Boulder of the mid-seventies, when Bill Matthews and Ed Dorn were among his teachers. He now teaches creative writing and the Emily Dickinson Seminar (and this semester a class called Keats and Stevens) at Boston College, with the indispensible Kim Garcia and Sue Roberts. He has work just out or forthcoming in The Antioch Review, The Big Ugly, Contrary, Town Creek Poetry, Prick of the Spindle, Skidrow Penthouse and others. He was nominated by The Aurorean for a 2007 Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, Dictionary Quilt (Pudding House, 2007), is about the weird dream landscapes of the American southwest. He is working on a book called Old Masters, Iraq War Edition.

Heavenly Stop by Alex Nodopaka

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