Night Drive

Michael Redhill
From:   Asphodel. McClelland & Stewart, 1997, pp24

Its promise opens at night
like jasmine petalling the darkness,
the dark road. In the windshield
the bright neon signs
GULF
HOPPER MOTEL
ALL DAY BREAKFAST
burn their covenants into the deep blueness all around
like cherubim.
To drive nights like this is to enter the new world,
the one they saw, trees bending into the inky black
like faces over a crib. It's there, that
phantasmal America,
and it still wants them, still
wants to show them
its new starlight. How easy it is
to love it on a warm night like this, to forget
everything that happened here, everything
that is about to happen.

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Michael Redhill's works copyright © to the author.