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Poem Written in Winter after Midnight at a Gas Station in Poe, Ohio
Death has always
been here in the blind spot of my driver’s side wing mirror
as I travel west
on I-90, cruise control set at eighty. Death is the pair of headlights
that follows me
these five hundred miles between Albany and Cleveland. One hour ago
I passed a semi
on the left in thick traffic but didn’t see the sign that said LEFT LANE
ENDS. The truck couldn’t
change lanes to let me through. I had to floor it, hit
110 miles per hour
as I squeezed between a concrete barrier and the braking truck
with inches to spare.
Life is the adrenalin rush when you have passed so close to death
that all you smell
is its diesel exhaust. Life is the bright crescent moon that waxes,
hangs above
the horizon, rises. Life is the long litany of towns on my night journey
west—Schenectady,
Amsterdam, Herkimer, Utica, Rome, Verona, Cicero, Canastota,
Cazenovia, Chittenango,
Memphis, Montezuma, Waterloo, Canandaigua, Avon, Albion,
Angola, Dunkirk,
Chautauqua, Ashtabula. Names so freighted with history or euphony
or dissonance that they are
larger than life, larger than any small town could ever hope to be.
Let death be no more
than the Dead Man’s Curve near downtown Cleveland, that not quite
ninety-degree turn
marked with transverse rumble strips and yellow caution signs that tell me
to slow down
to 35 miles per hour. One hundred thousand vehicles take that curve
every day.
Death is a daily event that we will live through or not. I stop
for gas with only
fourteen miles left in my tank and see a cube van filling up
at the pumps. Across
its thin, orange, aluminum hide is printed in an arc of blue letters
POE EMS,
which I misread for a split second as POEMS. How wonderful
to think
that there is a vehicle whose only cargo is poems. That it will deliver
poems
to the loading docks of box stores. But then I realize that it’s
an ambulance
offering Emergency Medical Service. It carries all of us
who are hurt
and in pain. Those with broken arms, legs, or collarbones.
Those suffering
heart attacks or strokes. Those inhaling slowly through oxygen
masks their last
breaths. Poems, too, should be vehicles that carry all our suffering,
our exhalations, exaltations,
our living, our dying. They, too, should heal us. I get back on the interstate
in the early hours
of the morning. When I nod off, I wake to rumble strip, that raucous
rock music I keep driving to.
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Donald Platt‘s ninth book of poetry, Tender Voyeur, will be published by Grid Books in the fall of 2025.His eight previous collections include Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (Cavankerry Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Iowa Review, Southern Review, New Criterion, and Paris Review, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000,2006, 2015 and 2025. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s English Department.
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Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, NYC.