A blue period

Sometimes when my head is tired
I hide in my car and gaze out the windshield

-my views, my roads, trees
I’ve passed hundreds of times, with
flowering weeds, potholes – and it’s
a strange newness in the same old scene
not unlike roads near the ocean
with detritus of evolution
or across the ocean in towns with
old churches, smaller spheres of family,
greater breadth of history than I can figure
because my ancestors seem to have
risen just in the last hundred years,
or so I’ve been told because I guess
we’re common stock with minimal
vintage appeal.

Blue, like the Picasso or the Monet blues,
I grip my steering wheel
without going anywhere except
in my head because the parking lot
is a great place to hide, a blank slate
to recall houses, dinners, disappointments,
and travel brochures for places
we’ll never go. Leave it to my people
to escape the arid mountains of Italy
and entrench themselves
in Pennsylvania coal mines,
trading salt for soot.
But the radio played the same war
on both sides and I think we just danced,
or at least that’s what I like to imagine
as the acorns hit my hood in the parking lot,
the cadence making me shimmy
in the afternoon.