Hallucination in a Rearview Mirror
……
Berkeley to Seattle non-stop, I imagine
straight through clean and clear, speed
unknown, childhood days on this same route,
white-out heat-blanched flatlands out
of Arbuckle to Corning, distance nothing but silver
shimmering road writhing before and after,
briefly, then seemingly vanished completely.
In Red Bluff the old signs of life: Live Oaks,
Battle Creek, a coat fluttering on a wire fence.
And it begins, the first wave of the Siskiyous,
beautiful blue lake Shasta like a dreaming crab,
island eyes into Whiskeytown undiminished,
Weed and the winter I wandered into a field
glittering with snow and world sinking sadness—
it seemed all rivers flowed from the north.
Now driving those days I thought long gone
wash through like a fever-break in Yreka,
on the border, relief of Ashland at night,
and think I’m free, from Medford to Salem,
and then surprise as I break through in Portland,
black waters, gleaming bridges, interstate
through land stroked flat by moonlight.
……
This poem is from the book Drifter by Douglas Cole (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/drifter-by-douglas-cole/
Drifter, the newest poetry collection by Douglas Cole, explores the world through Situationist Guy Debord’s framework of the Dérive. An idea that intensifies observance with an acute attention to the various forces that draw us in or repel us from engaging with certain spaces, the Dérive as an action or a philosophical idea provides a nuanced, personal, political, even spiritual vocabulary for investigating the spectacle of our experience in the landscape of rooms, neighborhoods, cities, highways…
Douglas Cole
The Paddock Review 