aspen engine

Oh look, it's my favourite motor vehicle again. (See also here, and here) I've been documenting its life over the past five years, and I finally finished a poem about it, that had lived in scraps for months and months.

* * *

aspen engine

when the car stopped driving

it rolled to rest in the back

forty, by the poplars at the edge

of the field. dead, they said.

no longer mobile. but within

weeks of abandonment,

an aspen engine slowly started

up, ignited this reclamation:

silver shoots pushing up amidst

stalled machinery, fingering the

shattered hood. eyes pried open,

& soon headlights emptied into

small portals for sparrows & the

chassis, a trellis for the twisting

blossoms of vetch. sunprinted vines

on the dash’s bleached plastic, rusted

springs of seat cushions swallowed up

in mossy upholstery. paint flakes

cling like periosteum & colonies

of sowbugs beneath the moist

deadfall of the brakes, seethe

like the memory of friction under

the foot of a driver’s ghost. now

only lichens creep with their slow

feet across the dusty windshield,

silvering filaments clustering,

mirroring the passage of clouds.

in its very heart, void of motor

the three trees grow: a burst

of new limbs to cradle the hull

as the rust comes chewing

small lamellae, claiming the skeleton

as carboniferous leaves fall in the

gravity of metal to earth. & so

this grove no graveyard for that

little green datsun, no scrapyard,

no junk heap. this is a plant,

a factory of deterioration, just a

shift in direction, shift into reverse.