High in the Sierra the Interstate
cuts its own course above the dry creek bed,
its swerves matching the mountain sides
only where math and matter marry to carve
the slopes I speed along, marvelling
at the mileage I make until, below,
I catch sight of a strip of buckled asphalt,
remnant of a turnpike no longer on the map.
This is how we age. Steep crests once
ground up laboriously in low gear are
blasted into empty air. One highway
replaces another. Weeds take root
in the cracks of the thoroughfare leading
nowhere. Above, traffic moves swiftly on.
*
A poem that has grown on me or, perhaps better put, that I have grown into.
In the summer of 85 I loaded my yellow VW squareback with all my possessions and drove up the 5 all the way to Vancouver and then across the Rockies to Edmonton. It was a risky return to academia but the clear result of a midlife crisis, one of several I had and survived.
Now the bravado of the poem as I read it then–onwards and upwards–has modulated into a melancholy more appropriate to someone no longer in midlife, not even subject to #FOMO anymore.