Millions of people drive during the holidays. To and from. Rarely just to. I drove through ice and torrents of rain south, then through a cloudy day north and into white mist and fog. The drive, something about the drive, and the time, and the strangeness of endlessly moving forward in relative terms, led to the poem below, and a work in progress:

 
The Trip

 

The vanishing point teases us
Tempts us with the power
Of horizons

So I tried
I really tried to outrun it

What exists beyond the V?
What exists?

How does it stay just beyond our reach
As we hurtle forward like a car?

Can we go beyond the center of the sky?
Can we trick what vanishes

Into the next phase
The next rationale?

I hurtle onward like a car
Hurtling through enclosed gray air
Through tunnels of trees

Evergreens

Not just like

Exactly like a car barreling down
A tunnel of Nature
Her children shooting up through
The white like guardians of growth

Like sentries stopping our wanderlust

Through the remnant of the great snow
Of 2009

Starting south moving north
From brown grassy shoulders
To white shoulders rising like
The presence of all color

Like ghosts dancing
Ice elated

Like white crows so thick they
Can’t herald death anymore
They just hover
Abandoned
Laughing

There is something mesmerizing behind the wheel
Going 75 the relativity of speed
The slowness of it all and the hurtling
Sense all at once
     Looking for the next
          And the next
And the next

 

 

— by Douglas Pinson