Walking With Eve in the Loved City: Poems by Roy Bentley

Author:Roy Bentley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, General, American
ISBN: 9781610756334
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2018-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

You Must Drive This Car

How suddenly I walked from the stage of my father’s life,

and because he objected to the violence in a video.

He asked me to pack and go, to leave his house—

I was 1100 miles from Ohio. Said it was about respect.

All right, I said, loading the stuff of my life.

He’d risen from the sofa, incensed, out of his mind

with those years he’d repaired Minuteman missiles.

(He carried the Cold War like a retirement watch.)

In the movie, though, the dead fell one at a time.

They weren’t white or American, anything to him.

It’s like this car salesman who got tired of his life

and, pressing, said, You must drive this car!

I told him what I told my father in Florida

as I turned to go: No one has to do shit.

I don’t know. Maybe the spray of blood and brain

became present in the room—what else?—in a way

it never had when he fixed the nuclear arsenal.

But only when he rose, like the heavens had opened,

did I begin to believe he cared about anyone.

And then his soul was this shout you had to hear.

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