☀ Today's Poem: "Joy Ride" Ron Slate

All the way down the street events occur
from which I'm held back, but in response to this blockage
their sounds and smells draw closer. An insult shouted from a passing car.
A burst of music and voices when the weathered door of the Knotty Pine
opens and two young women emerge, they came out from the tavern
and paused on the sidewalk beside a black-and-white idling at the curb,
the two cops had disappeared around the corner to lift a trash bin
tipped into the gutter as a prank, and the women scrambled
into the police car and sped away down Hancock Street.

But between the opening of the door of the Knotty Pine
and the screech of tires, the women's eyes swept over mine,
one hand gestured, and I got into the front seat with them.
There was the precipice, then the fall and tumble
flattening out into flight that in the span of my life
has never touched down, though when she who was driving,
she with the blue raincoat and clacking bracelet, said at the L Street bathhouse
you're getting out, whoever you are, I did. Some minutes later
they were stopped by the Boston police as the Globe later reported
in the copy I bought from the box outside the Knotty Pine

and the apartment I rented above with the slanted floor,
a view of a row of stores across the street, now eight stories
of condos, from the higher floors you can see the bay
and the boulevard we raced down towards the city
listening to the dispatcher telling us to stop before things go
too far, how far is that? the other one beside me asked,
she with the ponytail lighting up one of the cops' Marlboros,
her exhalations in my lungs, as years later on business flights
over oceans I inhaled everything depleted
and watched a film in which an anthropologist, having observed apes
attack their ape adversaries, still insisted humans are worth developing

even as some massacre or other was happening miles below
the refreshment cart coming haltingly down the aisle,
which makes me recall that the cops had also left behind, what else?
a bag of glazed doughnuts with which we took communion,
the rite of passage to another body by absorption, and truly
I've been so many persons and have carried them with me
from the beginning like some winged transport, de-iced
every morning and feeling upon waking as if someone
had been driving my car all night and tossed her trash
into the back seat while in dreams I eluded my enemies.

What has been withheld is fated to take form, the ancient laurel trees
are finally visible, all the way to Madeira I went to witness them
and the footpaths and irrigation channels, a craving for the memory
in the bodies of the landscape—the young women turned
into laurel trees, so the myth goes, in order to hide from Apollo—
a craving for anything that lasts longer than a few minutes of escape
which nevertheless are pitched against the years of dubious salaried effort
that demanded all my artifice and the emphatic movement of my hands
making a convincing case for what would master and dispose of me.
Office clothes I no longer wear, stuffed in a black plastic bag and shoved
into the Goodwill Industries receptacle, specifically the one
two blocks down from the Knotty Pine which took forty-five minutes
to get to, all the way with two remorseless young women
embodied in a radio song sung to whomever I am.