25.1.06

The Map of Cars, Mercury and Marquis

That was the labyrinth in the Gulch,
a hard right past the Philadelphia where
hash was the babysitting tutorial,
the only baby is in a jar, it is lifted.
Carmen and Peter and Jewish Jon ran off
while sister tailed along to see
some more of the avante guarde
on subway street. Can't remember
changing the baby but I must have arrived
to that engagement in the brougham.
Boy it seemed so big then and he
found the brougham a week later
in front of St. Elmo's bar and grill,
the cop in black boots authoritating:

"Do that again young lady and you'll get
fleeing arrest." What a thing! and now it's small.

Fleeing arrest, no better way to describe that
glide down Youngblood with brakes tapping,
the sides of the alley scraping
just short of a decision: up to Zacatacas
or down to the Lyric. Old Bear was up
in the canyon casting spells on the mons, mine
and several others, decision made down
to the bottom another hard right past
the grassy, past the flood-stained county
library up to the Baptist church where pies
never burned, zig-zag the castle rocks
wherein Bisbee Bob was dealing coke
from an old taco stand window
nearwhere the brakeman cracked
his victorian spine in the liffy-ditch then
up to the Ironman part of Cork, all those
serenity-prayer miners hacking in the echoes,
crawling just out of sight of the rectory,
slow enough to catch a whiff of the votives.
Another right but not so hard into garden
past the Chihuahua Spider across from our cousin's
which was empty except for the touching
we did under the ocatillo canopy near
the tunnel under the stairs and into the garage,
buried in the hill as it always was.
Up to Mayer to tuck that brougham in, her tail end
and they are all girls we said, part
of the celtic myth of deers, all the cars
are girls and you got away and pushed her spine
to the end of Laundryhill and let her down easy.
The eight track hauled out the year of the cat.