Three Days Before the Equinox, I Drive

east, away from you, the road empty enough for speed, the hour early enough for deserted strip mall to yield to yellow field, ruined barn, still picturesque from afar. Morning’s chill, first cold shoulder of autumn, grips like a rusted gear about to turn, the cyclical promise to utterly transform.

The motor grumbles into higher gear to meet the climb. Tiny clouds cling to the skirts of mountains, phantom children, wispy like the hair of our own imponderable child, whose sleeping head I kissed after rising from bed this morning, leaving her nestled beside the ridgeline and slope of you.

My sight shifts from highway to far away. I wonder at the accommodation, how eyes change shape, add tension to a lens, allow more in. Some things crisp into focus, others disappear, like the crack in the windshield, swallowed by swaths of red and gold, highlights in the mountain’s evergreen mane, becoming huckleberry, burnished maple, plundered aspen.

The equinox falls in a few days’ time. Soon the leaf chasers, soon the poets, soon you and I. Yesterday you told me you dreamed you were watching our daughter through a smartphone screen, a message as clear as nightmare. You said: What we need to do—by then I was dreaming myself alone, into this moment, seeing the world through another moving frame.

A drive that becomes a meditation blurs the conifers into one living, forested thing. I think about which trees get on, side by side, what their roots share, which ones are at war, grudging for drink and nutrient. You kept saying we—as if we could turn gold, too, arrive in a new splendor. I press the thought like a pedal, rumbling, going somewhere, faster.