Second Marriage Getaway Car

You’ll give the jeep the name of a schoolgirl
and paint her engine red. In the parking lot
you leave a playing card, a heart for someones’ dashboard,
the way a serial killer or monogamist might

attempt at getting caught. Summer will become fire
truck scarlet somewhere else, but next to her,
can’t get next to you, the radio had its way
of always complaining. Your valley became
ill with bad plumbing and stagnant wells
or will simply be sick of you, that old house balanced there
on the hill, above a mysterious brown trickle.

One day a man with rolled sleeves
shows up on the doorstep, delivering
knock-off filet mignon from the back
of a milk truck, and you’ll be like an ambulance
driving badly, all the while hidden
in the back, on the inside, all of this
trying, against physics,
to patch the blood back in, to unstop
the sinewy organ that will all go wrong,
part again of the same dream in which you are

plastering over a blue-veined demon
of a snake, sealing it back inside of the tiled wall
from which it grows, wet and dreadful and still
until you’ll drive for months and there will be tracks
in snow along the sidewalks, salted into slush
that by summer will steam the valley into haunting mist
around hairpin curves. You’ll be back

in the HOV lane alone and steering
through the silvery light where your death is that slowly
developing photograph you’ll try
ruining in the wind, stripping
yet another set of gears
until all that’s done is done.