Know we’re entering the last leg when I see the three white glowing crosses up there on the hill. Wrong side of Connecticut and I’m reading everything like an omen. There’s an abandoned biblical theme park up there, I say. I wonder if its current emptiness makes it more accurate. My father is in the driver’s seat, my father who once drove this same route straight through the night because my brother had a fever so bad he ended up in the hospital, my father who shoulders his love for us like one of those big, glowing crosses. The road is so dark we might as well be underwater, street-lamps like the transparent eyes of some deep sea creature. There is a sinkhole between us my words keep falling into. I learn it like a magic trick, how to speak and interpret the silence as if it’s an answer, combing through signs and breaks in the weather. A flash of irritation across his thunderous brow and I am left staring up at the sky, looking for the shift in the air I missed. We drive until the crosses slip past us, until they become nothing but receding echoes in the rearview mirror and then vanish completely.
Click here to read Oona MacKinnon-Hoban on the origin of the poem.
Image by zaigee on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Holyland, USA - October 29, 2024