Growing up in the West makes you very aware of the car culture
that we have here, you know.
Tucson's one giant parking lot.
I'm living in Chicago now.
And I don't own a car, and I love it.
I take the train.
I take a cab, take the bus, don't
have to worry about parking, or insurance, or anything
that comes along with that.
But before I lived in Chicago, I lived here,
and so cars were a major part of our culture
in just moving around.
It's very American of us.
"Deliverance and Dr. Porsche."
"Reverse engineered from the divine,
the perfected shut of a Porsche's door,
molding, mechanism, metal--
the sound is gratification.
The seat cradles your ass like an end to suffering.
The click of ignition, near silent rumble of an engine,
made to run like God's own wristwatch,
feet work through the footfalls of pedals in the rumba of rpm,
every law of physics induced--
inertia, speed, time, distance on command--
all of the pleasure, none of the math.
Stomach, delirious, mind, drunk on the butterscotch
of leather and coolant--
You're pushed back in the seat.
It feels as if you might die, or be born, or come.
The night you whispered to the girl with a bourbon eyes,
and then you die and are born and come.
This is made-in-Germany zen, a euphoria that fuses you,
and you bless Dr. Porsche's sweet bald head.
That is what Tom was trying to tell you,
but you couldn't translate.
The day he arrived at the door with the 911
he'd borrowed slash stolen from the doctor's house he sat
that summer, but you were too practical or scared,
and the afternoon newspaper waited in a pile
to be delivered.
Tom pleaded with a giddy smile.
You just kept folding and wrapping papers
in red rubber bands.
And this should be a metaphor now, but it isn't.
And the poem fails you the way you
failed to live a little that afternoon with your friend.
The headlines were nothing but tragedy anyway--
tragedy that could have waited at least
for a spin around the block.
This is about getting sideways again
in the back seat, the clammy rush of adrenaline that
accompanies out of control.
Deliverance is trust-- the conservation of momentum,
control in the swerve, learning how to turn out on the inch
of rubber and asphalt that grip, the thrill of a leather
steering wheel regained, and none of this can save you from
the eyes-shut-tight-stop-sign roulette that makes your chest
feel a little hairier.
Deliverance is letting go of the newspaper at the doorstop
moment, a perfect arc, without calculus or a graph,
the whisper across our lips--
perfection, what we say when we mean holy."