YOU CAN’T DRIVE THE SAME TRUCK TWICE was first appeared in The Georgia Review, and was included in Cathy’s second book, Traveling in Time of Danger,  published by Iris Press in the fall of 1998.

When I heard the sudden
thunder of my husband’s truck
explode into the drive
and saw him, after ramming
the defective gear-stick
into neutral, emerge crazy-eyed
and fevered, fling up
the battered hood, go down
and disappear beneath its open wound
of primer, I knew how the evening
would go. How deep into the moonlight
he would hang like Jonah, half in,
half out, his full weight given
to the wrench, gripped to the stripped
bolts and nuts, capping and uncapping
the ancient battery, his body
lost to that odd carcass of scavenged parts.
I loved him for his love of broken things—
the handleless hoes and axes, the sprung
rumble seat bought years ago
at auction, the legless chairs
retrieved from garbage heaps,
that truck each day he reinvented.
Like the rivers of Heraclitus. Like Van Gogh’s
olive trees and irises that quiver,
still. Bristle. As if caught forever
in the antique instant of their opening.
It’s why we love Jesus, some philosopher
once said, instead of God. Why lovers
love the moon that’s always falling.

© Cathy Smith Bowers, 1994, 1998.