So you had your share of summer nights, Cars braking along the river road– the world still asleep yet alive with threat, the high grieving sound of acceleration.

Beauty grew too fast, like your body, ungainly, unfaithful. Along the river road there were nodding lilacs. Every intersection dangerous. Your life dangerous, but you

didn’t know then how damage is made. Not just the flipped chassis, spun apart into anecdote–but night’s notched velocity ascending through a blue reservoir of scent.

No, to remember the inevitable in terms of engaged, disengaged, gear to gear, one heightening judgment–is to forget that back then the worst happened each time it happened.

What was speaking loud over the figure on the dash, that was God. Or not God– something flashing past each roadside presence: statue after gesturing statue trying to reverse your belief in imagination

as the opposite of fate. Imagine a speed at which you could make what was happening not be true, a speed at which you could bargain for it: that you, on fire, could be somebody else.