Studebaker Stick Shift

 

Studebaker Stick Shift

On back roads, gravel,  
Ed teaches me to drive.
We cross a stone bridge, Antietam Creek.
Ed says upstream from here the bloodiest day,
creek ran red, dead meat stinking in ditches,
young men our age, you and me
not the bankers
not the plantation owners
they were brothers like us slaughtering each other
because old people told them to.
Now it’s birdsong, green and peaceful,
honeysuckle feeding on bones.

Narrow road. Ed shouts: Slow down!
As I hit the brake, a souped-up Ford
yellow and black like a giant wasp
speeds over the hilltop mid-road,
would’ve been head-on. Somehow
Ed foresaw.

In California Ed’s brain a battlefield.
Thoughts drop like flies on a windowsill.
Studebaker, he laughs, sounds like a Swedish chef.
Still he remembers that creek, that bridge.
I remember Vietnam, his frantic calls,
how he steered me away
from that big hill.

…..

First published in Speckled Trout. Thank you editors Kevin McDaniel and Nancy Dillingham.
photo of Antietam Creek Bridge by David Mark