It was always 2Pac’s Makaveli in the tape deck
stuck clicking back and forth every six songs.
They’d get through both sides at least twice
before even thinking about starting the car.
Sometimes the beat pulsed with the current eddying along the island
& thin ceiling fabric swaying down, smoke folding out the windows.
Even now she doesn’t know a single word of any of the songs,
but she knows how sunlight nestled in each ring of the culvert
and how their conversations washed out of it even in drought
with the war cry of a blue jay always hanging at its mouth.
At her grandmother’s house just up the road she’d watch
robins fight blue jays trying to steal their eggs and marvel
at their relentless pursuit of the yolk of another. She
liked it when their hands just settled on their thighs.
He drove the road without catching any of the axle-busting potholes &
She fell in love with how he floated the LeSabre over the washboards.
She could, and still does, name almost every plant that grew between them
and the river and wonders if he still knows all the lyrics she never learned.
Back then the world, even the rutted-out parts, seemed smooth, easy.
Back then she listened to albums she didn’t like four times in a row.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 4.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of two poetry collections — River, Amen (winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars — and his writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and he believes every watershed should have a Poet Laureate.
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