Unanticipated
by Brad Davis
A large crow’s slowly rolling massage of warm June air
not twenty feet above the black, freshly re-paved highway.
Passing uphill a tall, likely fully-loaded eighteen wheeler
and instantly a fantasy of collision, rolling over, dying.
Between the two: time, yes. But no recall whatsoever
of having actually lived those connecting thirty minutes
happily hopped up on coffee, cruising home from a trip away.
Not a bonafide lapse, just an empty half-hour so much like
most of any given day getting the mundane done pretty
well—or well enough to cover the miles and arrive on time.
As arresting as the death fantasy was, there was no beauty,
nothing even close to it that would later buttress a memory
of the cab’s color or the trucking company’s name or logo.
I don’t even recall wondering about the driver’s long-haul life,
a thing I often do, having long ago wanted to be a trucker.
What stuck about the trip home was, rather, the rolling
motion of the bird’s muscular, black wings—practiced
as hands kneading the broad shoulders of radiant heat rising
from the road—and how I felt a bit like Moses watching
whatever it was he saw of the world-maker pass before him.
Brad Davis (MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts) is a California-born Canadian living in northeastern Connecticut. Poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, Vallum, JAMA, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Image, and many other journals. His most recent book is On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems.
