He isn't old enough
to be sitting up front
but I let him,
my little interlocutor asking
if they had cars
back when I was growing up—
and something clicks
into place
behind my ears
as my own smile lifts
like a drawbridge
with a clockwork
deep inside my chest
and a sloop with me in it
waving to myself
passes steeply underneath—
his seatbelt riding up against his cheek,
his little mug holding the question up
to my right ear,
the road to school unfolding
like an old familiar story
with a horse and carriage in it
and two riders
with hats:
Once upon a time
in the 1950s
they had cars but the cars
didn't have seatbelts,
so when they braked
the long right arms
of the mothers automatically extended themselves
across the chests
of the children riding up front—
and those maternal
turnstiles, those gates of love
coming down in the front seats
of cars braking all across America,
that pressure at chest level, that feeling
loved, protected, held
up in the front seat
of America
can still be felt
by those of us who are old enough
to remember,
and maybe by extension
by those of us who aren't.
Paul Hostovsky's poems appear and disappear widely online and in print, with most recent sightings in Poet Lore, Free Lunch, FRiGG, Visions International, Paper Street, Alimentum, Rock & Sling, and others. Paul works in Boston as an interpreter for the deaf.
