Poetry February 2010 | issue 410

Selected Poems

by Brian Doyle

BRIAN DOYLE lives in Portland, Oregon, where he edits Portland Magazine. He is the author of nine books, including most recently Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices (One Day Hill Press). His essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and Orion and have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing. He counts among his greatest accomplishments that a riveting woman said “Yup” when he mumbled a marriage proposal, and that the Coherent Mercy sent them three snotty, sweet, brilliant, muttering children.

Crash

There was a moment after the horrific car crash that I wish to tell you about. It wasn’t the crash itself, which occurred because of the usual greed for time, because a guy pulled out when he shouldn’t have and then there was blood, and it wasn’t the long moments after, when things slowly kept on happening, a tall calm guy on his cellphone calling the cops, a woman crying in her car, smoke drifting, one of the drivers moaning, glass everywhere it shouldn’t be, soon enough the approaching demanding wail of cop cars and the ambulance, the first impatient honk of a driver stuck a few cars behind where they can’t see what happened or hear the guy moaning or see the woman sobbing in her car, the first car inching past the broken smoking cars, the driver reluctant, but he has got to get to work, man, there’s nothing he can do, someone called a cop. No, we know those moments, we have all seen those moments, we have been in those moments, God help us, and we have each and every one of us driven through the shatter and the smoke, past the moaning and weeping and shock, but there was something about the first minute after the crash that haunts me to the point where I have to write it down even though I know I am not good enough to catch the shiver of it, the tremble, the way everyone within earshot stopped whatever momentous or thoughtless or normal thing they were doing and focused on who among us was hurt, paid the most ferocious attention for once not to who we are and what we do, but who they are and what they did, or what was done upon them. I swerved out of the way, shocked and cursing like everyone else, but as I sat there, rattled and thinking my back was busted this time for sure, I saw four people jump out of their cars and run like crazy to where there was pain. All the rest of the day I’ve smelled shame and hope.

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