Driving Back with Robert
He’s looking for an image of eternity –
remembering long boyhood summer days
of repetitive farm work – maybe mowing,
going back and forth across the hayfield
humming above the warm machinery clatter
in the August light. Time was so huge
then. It could not fail. “But that’s not it,”
he says and turns his face to the window
to think again –
……………………… but now I’m six years old,
riding beside Big Ted in a truck pulling
a mower across acres of field on either side
of the driveway that swept down to the road
from the big house where my father
was chauffeur. On the high lawns, a row
of summer gardeners scour the lawn of every
weed on their knees like scrub ladies, but
Big Ted and I rattle and clunk all day in a
suspensionless pickup, I dozing a kind of
jolting in and out doze, up and in and under
and up like a flying fish on a sea, such a vast
sea, such a long day, back and forth, back
and forth, endless, endless, endless.