Sean Cole – (cole)


Sean Cole

30 Lines.
for Aaron Kiely.


There’s a long tradition of writing in cars and driving in cars.
Whitman at 30 whipped out a bolshy little number late spring
while parked behind the wheel of a standard barber. It starts:
“Loafe oft oh grazing menial patron, come close

yet don’t go gross.” Moments later Eliot sang “Ash Wednesday”

in a tenor’s ear, bumbling through Walt’s field in a Ford Gestalt.

I am now more than 2/10ths through this poem.

Goofy, but even Dickinson drove,

in her room, in a plastic bus, yelling

“Don’t come up!” to the man rattling a schedule on the landing.

“Gas has damned this Amherst,” she once beeped.

Later, Plath was gluing Hughes on the backbench

Of a Chevy Rainstorm when he got the idea for

“Hawk’s Yontif” and jumped into the front bucket,

sending her, ass over tooth-problem, down, boom, to the baseball diamond
of her Wellesley birth.

She calls up Sexton, says, “How much is a bike over at Orff’s these days?”
Burroughs then painted a golden novelist

on the side of a Dodge Courtroom and shot it.

He didn’t get arrested but had to motor young adventists

to the sea-sharer every weekend and that’s when he got arrested.

G. Corso. A giant. A driver. He pushed a

Mazda Klonopin down Brattle without wearing a theme-park. Okay?

Antler had his ears on for a wired rig when he

was hauling big leg irons. Even Pinsky’s had his

little finger in a gear, setting little votes on fire beneath the dash.

And me I’m sitting here in our Honda Coroner, moving

the wheel with one hand, sitting in the passengers seat, parked,

maybe a little late for your party, looking at my house,

trying to recall my phone number.

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