war everywhere, war viral in the veins, the ganglia
gang,
for whether it’s the Toyota from Maine
going 60 down 20, the two-lane that must be the main
street for every mill town all the way to Canada, 
that nearly clips me off at the knees when I run
across to the post office, or the minivan pulling out
of the Spring
Company (and why do people like to drive those things
which waddle and surge like wheeled-bathtubs, slow
as houseboats churning their engines to get their
pontoons
somewhere!) into the gap between clotted cars, though
the driver’s forgotten that traffic travels in the
other 
direction too, and so has to screech for a halt 
when it’s a city bus going through, her mouth 
yells shit! at the bus, her cab fills
with other expletives, and I, reading her lips, wonder
how many
die, cursing, like this, as the pedestrians take their
courage
in their hands and dart out, 
many  wobbly, arthritic, cane tapping (so many 
permanently injured in birthplace of the industrial
revolution) or drunken steps
like the guy inspired at the local bar to go for broke
and cross to the gas station for lotto tickets. Most
have their ears glued to the news, every cochlea
glued to a cel,  another voice directing them like
divine
or demonic intervention, their steering mechanisms 
making a haze of blunderbuss oblivion 
surrounding every head with the halo of certainty 
over what matters--once drivers drove blind 
into the sun, as if it were an eternal destination, 
(like that man impaled on his own steering wheel
when he rear-ended a runaway truck carrying
watermelons,
their green rinds split open, too, all over the
highway)
now everyone’s  in conference calls, business
meetings, pagers, 
newspapers on the dash, always listening to 
a transmitted voice so she or he don’t feel alone
the here and now, here and now  where 
they’re counting on us, even me, atom among other
atoms,
to be awake, to stop in time, to take care of them 
as they attend to elsewhere. And we do, most 
of the time, we do, even  the old vet
with the faded support-our-troops ribbon stickered
on his trunk who’s going 15 at a crawl and brakes
hard, 
because he’s spotted some younger (well, most 
of them are, comparatively) woman and though 
she won’t be crossing the street or even reach the
curb
for another minute or two, he’s got to take chivalry’s
abrupt stop, be the one who throws down 
his gears to let her cross the street.  Expecting as
much
from the warning of his wobbling wobble, I brake
and hope the row of two ton dominoes behind me 
is awake enough to notice, to keep 
from cascading in a six car fender bender,
richocheting
all the way back to the impending
5:10 where some, to save time, have stopped on the
tracks, 
and so we make room for each other’s random 
bumpings, bumped, bumpkins halted at random like
electrons
steering along our particular orbits along a common
electrical path, and hoping not to collide on get
stuck
in some other driver’s sticky threaded karma pit, 
and I wonder if that’s what she meant, Nina Simone
singing “human kindness is overflowing, and I think
it’s going to rain,” in that voice—oh, that voice, 
such a surge bowl of low moan and honey light
makes a bee humming of even these end-of-the-day-
worst –hour-for-it, errands, as if my circuituous
paths were a minor liminal of chaos theory, so many
years
and no wrecks, so many speeds and no tickets, 
and knowing it’s mostly luck, and perhaps that’s
what they all count on—jumping out from between
two cars to jaywalk 5 lanes of rush hour traffic—or
the luck or the sharpness and dullness
of others, surely, someone will pay attention 
to me! each atom thinks, as if
we were all atoms, constellating out of some maternal 
bed that held us in our hands, imagine, as if the
universe
were mama, or as if we had murky eyes sharp for unseen
movement, and me too, what else is it that shrewd 
slow down, for no reason,  flying at 80 on the
motorcycle
at night just as I approached the crest of a small
hill,
just long enough, just soon enough, before the mule
deer
jumped out of the sagebrush into the middle of the
asphalt, 
time enough to stop and wonder, before veering away,
dumb luck, the same sort of luck of dodging bullets,
and hoping that nothing happens, that today 
one doesn’t see  the man who sits in the grass and
watches
the blood spread like a strange ivy through the fabric
of his shirt, the woman threaded with blood wandering
dazed down the medium, o terrible vision when
I was five, and always war everywhere, always
war still, viral in the ganglia, and the nerves,
and still I’m rushing, always rushing home,
as if love were waiting with its words that might 
make me cry, surge with tenderness, a sugar 
volt melting, and say that it’s over, the war
everywhere, always war still, viral in the ganglia
and the nerves in a world where Alice’s Family Dining
has pitched a sign on the corner we must all corner
by--
Italian wedding soup 
(very popular here), $8.95 a quart today only-- 
yeah right, as fresh as last week-- 
oh my wiseacre voiceover that knows love’s just
Alice’s chalk screeching on slate, a good woman,
torn as she is, if there ever were an ‘Alice’,  torn
between
leftovers for altruistic soup kitchens and trying to
make
the sale of the day in "Clock City," the birthplace 
of the industrial revolution.

Rebecca Seiferle
11:57 March 1, 2006, Waltham MA



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