We treasure-hunted her
through every junkyard on the dusty fringes of
Oakland and San Francisco,
dreaming we would find her—
hood staved in, mice
nesting in her upholstery, eucalyptus
leaves ribboned along the sleek
lines of her fenders.
We were men who loved beauty,
Carlos and Billy and I.
And because we were American men,
we looked for beauty in an automobile.
A Buick Skylark, 1953—
light-wing’d dryad
of the open road, as Carlos called her,
riffing on Whitman and Keats,
like the song that was also Skylark.
Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael wrote it,
Ella Fitzgerald sang it.
While our wives and children slept,
we were going to work nights in Billy’s garage
grinding the rust out,
smoothing and priming and painting her
to gleam like the sea off Laguna Beach.
Her half-life began
before Trump, before Q-Anon,
before Nixon, before McCarthy,
before J. Edgar
fucking Hoover.
How brief her moment was,
born from the uplift of power
that sank the aircraft
carriers of the rising sun,
bombed the libraries and concert halls
of men who murdered the Jews of Europe
and stacked their skulls in the world’s imagination.
Our dream was American
as baseball, as war,
brief as a song on top-forty.
So what if we never found her?
We three amigos steering her
down the Great Highway in our dreams
—that’s as real as anything.
The blue sky
radiated from our Skylark’s chrome,
her V8 engine sang with full-throated ease
as we glided through the years of our manhood
behind the wheel of a song.