Poems by Keith Dunlap

Headlights

by Keith Dunlap

From Canary Winter 2016-17

Keith lives on a street where all the houses have foundation cracks. The houses sit on landfill and abut an ancient stream depression which, if it rains hard enough, still runs to the shallows of the nearby cove.

The rain so unrelenting that the rain
and the sound of rain are one pragmatic roaring,
a cataract through which the logging truck
ahead of us laboriously climbs;
on one side, the blur of an angry forest
crowding as close as it can,
like a mob pressed against a chain-link fence
to watch us slowly die;
on the other side, we can only guess
that the precipitous decline is a bottomless well
into which our car could be tossed like a coin.
So why then does my husband persist
in trying to pass the lumbering truck,
as if each invisible moment is a torture
from which he must immediately escape,
pulling out in suicidal hope
that nothing is coming our way?

Previously published in the author’s collection Storyland from Hip Pocket Press, 2016