A green truck in the rain

Robert In The Rain
For Nicole

Every time he leaves, he leaves alone. Every time he’s
a long way from home. Every time I want her to get out
of the red truck and go to him. Every time he is reduced
to a green truck in the rain, a green truck moving slowly
after turning left, turning towards the place where the sun
dies a little more unnoticed every day, past the small town
shops that sell printed dresses, past streets that never hear
a foreign accent visited from anywhere else in the world.

America is like this. It is like this too. It settles one day
into a sickbed that can only offer the condolences of love,
the sorry bushels siloed from a life lived too lonely
in the bosom of family and home, a terrain too familiar
and undangerous, a safe country asking no taken risk,
granting no promise of a sudden and feral unforeseen.

And every time I double up, I bend over deep to bear the reading
of the letter that arrives, his book of pictures, pictures taken
over four days, the four days they were in the season of their love,
the return of her crucifix made in Assisi, his life reduced now
to words and pictures, the overrun moments that time rivers away
inexorably as if it was meant to be this and this way only.

And when she becomes smoke, smoke thrown over bridges too
dear to bear it, smoke that unlengthens itself like a breath of snake
aspirated on the winterborne breeze, I hear her sing for the first time. I see her summered hair trailing over the shoulder of the still Madison County banks, the scent of her laughter lingering in the smooth trees, the farawayness of her eyes sugared on the small and lowing sun.

If one day, you should see a figure cloaked in a sheeting
of wet weather, his eyes cut from the deep routes of worn water,
his face a running of skies without anchorage, his lips a plain of
extinct herds that have forgotten the reason for their long-vanished migrations, do not let him drive off alone toward some place without you because nothing is more lethal than love, more treacherous or destructive, for it is the one force in the universe that requires the weakest carrier bear it for it’s own sake.

One day, I will be reduced to mere pictures and words,
margined dimly in the memories of a woman like you.
And like a Robert in the rain, I am done so now.

Joseph Gallo
December 21, 2003