Dylan at High Speed
A new poem by Stephen Sexton.
Dylan at High Speed
Because my bed was in the countryside,
the few taxi men cruising junctions
would not take me there
for the dead miles back to town
and the swirling, equivocal snow.
Like silver velvet, hoar frost grew
around the trees, frost
the streetlights insisted be amber.
A winter Sunday, the city almost deserted,
the buses cooling in their dormer towns.
At the zebra crossing on Botanic,
shrunk with time, doddered the bones
of my old French teacher. His wife
led him by the hand.
Those days,
he was hushed, classical power—
tailored suits the iridescent green of peacock breast,
black turtlenecks, a pat of ginger hair.
He lost it at the blackboard once,
and smashed a chalky duster into the subjunctive.
A few weeks later, between the SNCF
(billets, carets, obsolescing francs) and
a year abroad in Bergerac in the eighties,
where this girl served him coffee
under a parasol on the river,
he wept at his desk
until the principal sent him home
for the first three seasons of the new millennium.
His neighbor, my friend,
watched him rake a single pile of leaves for hours
back and forth across the lawn all mid-term break,
and his wife retired early from the prison. In his class
language happened to me: I saw corpsresemble corporal, guerre guerrilla. Suddenly
dawn broke purple on a youth hostel—
aubergine, aubergine!
Too late now to say thank you.
Courtesy Cabs
is more speakeasy than taxi depot.
From the back room stocked with warm, cheap beer
and counterfeit spirits, Dylan came swinging his keys,
seventeen at most.
He took roads narrow and new to him
at high speed. Foxes whipped under hedges
into the green out-of-sight they live in, the all-night
fauna were lowing and hunting, corncrakes called
the calls of their impersonators. We sang along
to show tunes, he offered me the
joint he dropped between his legs
and remembered a dream he’d had the night before
where he called his dad a cunt. What would he say
if he knew, I said. I don’t know, he said.
I paid him double the fare because I had it.
I couldn’t bring myself to think what I thought
he was supposed to do with it.
And indoors,
my father was asleep in his chair. On the television,
divined here and there by rumors of rain,
herds of bearded blue wildebeest
stampeded across the eastern savannah.
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