A macho thing, to want to drive- <br />I drove to Omaha for one day; <br />They were selling the truth at a yard sale <br />In a yard of red clay, like a baseball diamond, <br />Like a diamond mine; it was in the carving <br />Of an asymmetrical cross, and more so in her eyes, <br />The apathetic religions she lets pass in her gaze, <br />But I did not follow her into the church as she <br />Crossed herself, but remained out in the frozen <br />Shadows like torpid beasts and faceless pillars <br />Beneath the haunted overpass, <br />And tomorrow and the next day I’ll be driving again <br />With four macho men, as we go to set up the white <br />Lungs of elephants, this summer’s lucrative patriotism, <br />And the sky will be filled with ephemeral pacaderms, <br />As along the highways the semis will roar like overloaded predators, <br />And for awhile we will sit and have lunch and tell lies, <br />And then we will send our patriotism to plume verdantly <br />In the effluvious sky, and whisper enraptures that war <br />Is kind, for a holiday from her religion, <br />In the scars of an enlightening night, we did away with <br />Our superheroes in the fire when we were five, but <br />Her eyes, her eyes are cities of sleepless ghosts, because <br />I love you and I live under your stormy overpass, <br />Though I could wish to drive away, but all around me is <br />The sea of your eyes; I would wish to drive away, <br />For it is macho to drive away in the eerie green broadside sky of <br />A disaster movie, but I am a little more than fay, <br />And from the sideways I am grim, a silhouette nice and <br />Tan and gray- A macho thing to want to drive, <br />But you have me hypnotized in your righteous eyes, <br />And I would rather sit with you and have lunch and tell lies.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/matadors-and-steve-mcqueen/
