Elegy for a 2003 Saab 9-3

How to recount all the roads we've been down,

all the things we've done and seen?

How many times have I cried inside you, have I

bared my naked thoughts to your cracked leather and

fuzzy velveteen upholstery?

How many times have I patted your dash after you went

over a particularly nasty pothole - sorry, sorry- each one feeling

like game over because of how close

to the ground we both were?

.

But you know the thing about being close to the ground is that you become

part of everything, the world something you can reach out and

feel the ruts and dips of, beneath the squeak and rattle

of your undercarriage, the things tumbling

across your back seat, the hiss of air from the aberrated

seal in your left front door.

I was part of you then, my tired bones fused

to your weathered wheel, the windshield a giant

cyclopian eye we shared, and each mile of tar we ate up a shared victory,

your odometer growing fat with the spoils.

.

If I had my way, we'd go on forever, and every time

you broke I'd patch your seams and you'd be as

unbreakable as my own broke soul, horsepower a riderless horse.

What I'd like most for us both

is to continue down the rutted trail of life, taming each new challenge

the way we tamed the highway, my one-time greatest fear

(you trammeled the on-ramp to my heart and you're always

going to be parked somewhere there, wedged between

the clavicles and cavities, engine purring,

warm.)

.

Several times, they wanted to leave you for dead;

get something new, they said.

I promised everyone I knew I'd ride you

into the ground but that was before I got an offer I couldn't afford

to refuse. And so we relinquish this battle on civil terms-

the fact that you never actually died lends you mythic properties in my

head, the notion that with a couple thousand here or there,

you could have kept going, a dented, modest knight sailing through

vehicular valhalla, cruising an endless tongue of slick black road

under an eternally rising sun.

.

After they come for you,

will you lie in a field with the wind whistling

over your bones, picked clean of your insides?

if I were to visit, walking down the rows of hollowed out

skeletons, would I find you, absent of everything

including me? (would I want to?)

I struggle with the fact that you might have to wait,

under the rising and setting sun, under the wearing of the sand and

the dirt and the wind and ice, perched on bare rims like

shoeless feet. Will there be a despondency in that, or will there be

purpose, from being mined to the end? Or will there simply be,

like the spacing after the final period in a manuscript,

rest?

.

What is a car but a hunk of scrap metal, the sum of its working parts?

What is a heart but a persistent beat, and failing that, a hunk of muscle,

spilling cooling blood?

.

I used to have nightmares of dying on some road so far from home,

my only comfort that you'd hold me even then, that when

my heart stopped it would stop amidst the dwindling tick

of your shattered shell, your long-dead radio playing a song

we both loved so well.