Roy Bentley: “Elegy with Cloudless Summer Sky”
ELEGY WITH CLOUDLESS SUMMER SKY
after Beth Gordon
When I say tire, I mean the truck tire
loosed, bouncing down a summer hillside
outside Charleston, West Virginia, I mean
a truck tire that crashed into my Toyota Solara
on the driver’s-side top-curve of the windshield,
calamity in a split-second concomitant to cresting
a hill, I mean I got lucky and the tire didn’t kill me,
I mean a fractional second of warning and BOOM—
not one single cloud in the sky above that interstate,
I mean we were showered with glass bits, I mean
we were sitting in chartreuse safety-glass, concussed
and struck absolutely silent by what might have been,
I mean a grandson born during the pandemic wouldn’t
have been had anything happened to its mother, I mean
a truck tire could have killed me but didn’t and should
have but didn’t injure my daughter Cait, I mean if luck
is being in the right place at the right time, this was that,
I mean the northbound passing lane of I-77 a mile outside
Charleston, West Virginia is evidently the place to sidestep
death and be reminded how it comes for us, Death, I mean
the world is coming apart and hurling itself at us all the time.
Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize; as well as My Mother’s Red Ford: New & Selected Poems 1986 – 2020, published by Lost Horse Press. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, december, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Southern Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His latest is Beautiful Plenty (Main Street Rag, 2021).