—1979
There has to be darkness and a highway.
Beyond the shoulders of the road,
a topography, splayed and lit in street lamps.
You’re seventeen, and Hotel California
is playing on the radio. If you look close
enough, you can see the silhouette of
mountains beyond your own reflection
in the car window. To the right, an anchor
store in a strip mall. To the left,
the gas station where high school boys work—
the good looking ones who sweep the silk
of their long bangs from their eyes
with puppy-soft hands, and ask if you want
regular or unleaded. Watching them comb
your windshield clean beneath
the squeegee’s wide, forgiving blade,
you might imagine whispering: Save me,
and wonder, does anyone do that anymore?—
the windshield washing, you mean, of course,
and you know that if you slid your fingers
inside the thick baffles of their goose-down
vests, down into the warmth beneath
their soft-as-ash flannel shirts, your palms
would smell like gasoline and their father’s
Old Spice, and that in the star bristled night,
every imagined kiss was a curfew, exquisitely unfair,
and a promise you had made in a fever to return
home what you’d borrowed just the way you found it.
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