#MIDDLEBURY
Road Trip
Vijay Seshadri
I could complain. I’ve done it before.
I could explain. I could say, for instance, that
I’m sick of being slaughtered in my life’s mountain passes,
covering my own long retreat,
the rear guard of my own brutal defeat –
dysentery and frostbite and snipers,
the mules freezing to death,
blizzards whipping the famished fires until they expire,
the pathetic mosquito notes of my horn . . .
But, instead, for once, I’m keeping quiet, and maybe tomorrow
or maybe the day after or maybe the day after that
I’m just going to drive away down the coast
and not come back.
I haven’t told anyone, and I won’t.
I won’t dim with words the radiance of my gesture.
And besides, the ones who care have guessed already.
Looking at them looking at me, I know they know
when they turn their backs I’ll go.
The secrets I was planning to floor them with?
They’re already packed in my trunk, in straw,
in a reinforced casket.
The bitter but herbal and medicinal truths I concocted
to revive them with?
Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that,
on the volcano beaches fringed with black sand
and heaped with tangled beds of kelp,
by the obsidian tide pools that cradle the ribbed limpet
and the rockbound star,
I’ll scatter those truths to the sea breezes,
and float the secrets on the waters that the moon
reels in and plays out,
reels in and plays out,
with a little votive candle burning on their casket,
and then I’ll just be there, in the sunset’s coppery sheen,
in the dawn pearled by discrete, oblong, intimate clouds
that move without desire or motive.
Look at the clouds. Look how close they are.
About this poem
“‘Road Trip’ is a simple, enduring American fantasy (‘But I reckon I got to light out for the territory’) elaborated into a structure complicated enough to justify a theme so perennial and familiar. I’ve been dealing with a lot of painful and insoluble problems lately.” – Vijay Seshadri
About Vijay Seshadri
Vijay Seshadri is the author of “3 Sections” (Graywolf Press, 2013). He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Vijay Seshadri. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
