Sing Your Hymn of the Open Road, by Renee Gilmore

     The maroon convertible was all winged fenders and pintucking, a glossy angel dropped from the Corvette heavens of Bowling Green. Glass-pack pipes murmured and growled like Leonard Cohen in his later years. That car, that sound, even that color heralded your arrival at every stoplight, summoning your acolytes to point and stare. Flags waved and marching bands played. You probably thought they are for you.

     You smiled, so benevolent. Fatherly, for just a moment. To me, that chrome, those pipes, only signaled leaving. I saw what you couldn’t: When you inserted the key in the ignition and turned it over, you reanimated. Your face relaxed, and you were happy, even, in a way you couldn’t even pretend to be when you were here. How could a daughter compete with that Siren call of the open road? 

     You scorched the newborn grass at the side of the driveway, lifting and pressing your brown booted foot on the accelerator, your movements rhythmic, tense, masculine. As you revved that engine, it was a racehorse waiting, impatient to be released to the freedom of the track. You gave life to every piston, and the RPMs leapt and fell at your command. Unlike you, the gauges told no lies. 

     It was quieter, after that final crescendo, and the shiny pipes barely quivered. You gestured to me with a few fingers above the steering wheel, halfway between a salute and a wave. Then you shifted the gears and began to reverse, slowly, a hand flung over the back of the bench seat, your head turned away from me. Words fluttered in your breeze. 

     How did I consider you – when you drove off the long side of the map? I asked the robins singing their cheerful tune above me, but they forgot how to carry that tune. The leaving song. Just as you forgot the concept of me, of what it meant to be home. Family. You were far too restless to ponder such things. And wishing got me nowhere. You and your machine devoured the highways, swaying to the two-part harmony of hypnotic thumps and hum of rubber eating asphalt. I immersed myself in books, seeking hidden messages and obscure answers from explorers like you. But there are some roads even poetry cannot hope to cross. 

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