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Poetry
by Nicola Winstanley
Matter
You get it finally, on the drive home—this is the distillation
of wrong choices: a wide grey wasteland of nothing much, the
road’s black lick, and impossibly far-off hills, dim blue and
indistinct in the distance. The view swirls behind and in front of you
endlessly and the only colour is the red sun on the horizon, falling from the sky
and furiously boiling behind particulates; its earth-altered light oozes over
beige boxes where people live, maybe, side-by-side, identical.
After a while, you feel something pull on the tips of your fingers
as your hands grip the wheel: it’s the centrifugal force of the earth’s
slow grind, drawing your soul from your body as plasma; it pours
into the atmosphere where it takes form and mingles with the heavy metals
that contaminate the air. You see it walking beside you on the highway
like a spaceman, weighed down by lead dust on the soles of its feet:
the toxic ghost of the life you wanted. It’s slow and lost and disappearing
over the infertile fields looking for anything else,
but this.
At the wheel, your body collapses in on itself until you’re all matter,
no light.
But you just keep driving because there’s nowhere left for you to go
and no other way to get there.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Nicola Winstanley | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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