In the amphitheatre of nighttime driving - written late November 2016

In the amphitheatre of nighttime driving

Among the tailgaters and drivers texting in fast, tight

traffic from southwest Florida on I-75

the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2016,

dispiritedly they made their way north to the pain

in the resumption of ritual labor on rising

the following Monday morning.  That we could be this pair

of separate individuals makes this flat prosaic

prelude more intimate.  Rather than short fiction wrought from

inner anguish over one’s control of reality,

we express our inner anguish, and we take part in a

purgative ritual, katharsis.  Some, in carefully

grave number and voice and meter, are here to sing about

it and dance in patterns of observation and common

suffering.  It is all mimicked from among these ancient

stones and from beneath heaven’s proscenium.  And in the

middle of things, we are still sitting still in this enclosed

space the entirety of which is hurtling in the left

lane at eighty-one miles per hour, the antistrophe, and

in strophes stretching in the distance from Tampa to the

turnpike, from the turnpike to I-10, from I-10 to I-

475 back to I-75, from north

of Macon to I-675, stretching northeast

to I-285 to home.  The stretch of the last short

strophe to home is difficult, even without something

of the gravity of Poseidon’s last interventions. 

But later, Monday morning, when the anagnorisis

arrives in the bathroom mirror with wild hair, and its face

unshaven with bloodshot eyes that peer into a blinding

reflection—a mimesis of human misery—and,

in the future that comes after, resolves in memory.