As I drove my truck down the Appalachian Skyway
from Allentown to Birmingham,
hauling coal for Alabama’s refurbished steel mills,
I stopped off near Asheville
for lunch and spiritual renewal.
As I worshipped at the cairn of rescued skulls
at the Shrine of Remembrance,
sacred to Gaia and Poseidon.
I thanked wrathful Gaia
for her merciful stalwart mountains,
and recited the lessons my grade school had taught me:
How Poseidon in his heated anger
undercut the Greenland icecap,
creating a giant cavern
larger than the sunken states of Delaware and New Jersey,
and metro New York City, too.
Stalactites hung like giant fangs from the cavern’s roof,
glittering phosphorescent
like the eyes of selkies or werewolves
dreaming of revenge.
That block of ice loomed far above,
higher up than New York’s arrogant Freedom Tower was tall,
until its mile-thick mass of ice
plummeted
into the waters below.
Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Lisbon,
Liverpool, and all of Ireland
drowned deluged before midnight.
Do skeletons dream of those mile-high waves
as their final living vision?
Today, though, I take solace in the magnificent view,
a sunlit ocean far below the Asheville cliffs where I worship,
its waves mild and serene
above a seabed
where cornfields and corporations once reigned.
As I drove off towards Birmingham
and its beachside resorts,
I munched idly at my kelp and cods-roe cookies.
My truck backfired,
and the view of the cairn behind me
disappeared behind a cloud of smoke.
Sam Friedman has published hundreds of poems and many books, including Teamster Rank and File; Making the World Anew: Poems of the New Dialectic; and A Precious Residue: Poems that ponder efforts to spark a working class socialism in the 1970s and after.
