Poems December 2004
Route 17
The ancient evening is distempered
by a brutal wash of luminescence
that is Route 17 during Christmas
a highway and a holiday well-matched,
a place and time profitably bound
up in a storm of white light and commerce:
Tool Town, Bennigans, Filenes
Basement. Decembers overhead
split by Boeing 747s
headed for Newark, I could hardly hear
the frantic conversation in my ear
as we sat in traffic under ten
Santas on top of a Plymouth dealers
roof, their big hands turned up to heaven.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 Number 4, on page 39
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