Driving Lesson

The first time I sat behind
the wheel of a car I was
just-turned seventeen. Parking lot of
the Baptist church; the neighborhood in
deep summer, the man across the street
steadily planting flowers.
My dad in the passenger seat, my little sister
in the back, the blue Oldsmobile
right in the middle of the lot, empty
except for one tan sedan
in a corner—an evening practice for the organist,
or a summer-night janitor. I removed,
at Dad’s instructions, the parking brake,
hesitated, took my foot off
the brake pedal, and as three-thousand pounds
of American-made steel groaned forward
over gray asphalt, I felt
tears leak from my eyes, hot and fast,
just a few, unstoppable. They laughed
at me, but I knew, with the vision
withheld from the middle-aged and from the child,
that something had died that night,
under the summer twilight,
and that that elephantine lurch
would kill again.