Small Victory

I drove that truck

My father’s

From Portland to Los Angeles

Only to work at an auto shop in Sun Valley in the dead of winter

The nice thing about it

Driving home to my studio apartment

My hands stretched to block the sun

The sun that broke against my fingers like a thousand different memories

Stopping by the diner

The one on Colfax where you worked

Asking for direction to the bowling lanes, the pinball frames

The ones we carved like riverbeds having laughed our way there in previous lives

“I’m seeing someone,” you would say.

“If you’re seeing someone, where is he? I don’t see him.”

And it was the greatest joke ever told

On days out on the boulevard

The nights of fiery Hollywood

It rained on no one’s Cadillac

The entire city spinning tires into the ground until the morning

Sobering

Opening the door between her legs

Receiving word of my father’s illness

On a telephone

Across a great divide

Looking out onto a swimming pool

As forgotten as a fish tank

“I’m not seeing him anymore,” you said.

“I should probably get back there,” I said.

“OK,” you said. “But not before milkshakes.”

Who painted this ominous, parking lot sky?

And if I had not gone to Cassell’s with you

And sat with you and ate with you by way of the great Midwest

If I had not been with you on that humid, starless night

I fear

I would not have prolonged my father’s life by much at all

I needed the coexistence of things

The reassurance that tangled things could still unravel

And I achieved this in a small way

There

That time on Victory Blvd.

I eased into the demise of it all

Just as I eased that truck

A mile at a time

All the way back along Highway 5

Around Eugene, the sun arrived

In the darkness, it broke in two

I stretched my hand out toward the coastal fragments

The scattered meteors that cut through forest

They lock their sights for just a moment

Catching you

Like hunted game and then release