The day I heard Elvis Presley
I was sitting behind the wheel
Of my uncle’s ’46 Mercury coupe
At the weedy edge of a cornfield
Where yellowed stalks awaited
The rain that would never come,
Where a machine swallowed
And chewed the stunted bounty
Into dross that would satisfy
The hogs and cattle but do nothing
To appease the bank, the creditors
Who joined the dubious appeals
For clouds in the hot, listless sky.
I had the wheel in my hands
But there would be no jostle
Over the clodded, dusty earth.
No grind of the starter bringing
The engine to ticking life.
I had come with my father
To deliver a can of gasoline
To the smoking tractor in the field.
My uncle was in the Navy,
Somewhere on some ocean
I had never seen although
I had imagined a landscape
Of nothing but water and sky
And I believed that the gray ship
Churning through the waves
Was a fitting escape from a life
That seemed, day by day, to shrink,
To rob the air I needed to breathe,
To surround me in darkness
Filled with whispers of doom.
While my father in the distance
Filled the tank, deftly, without
Slopping the volatile liquid
As I had done when I tried,
I turned on the radio in my uncle’s car
And moved the dial through
Static and voices and advertising jingles
Until there came a voice from a heaven
Much different than the one I feared
Because it couldn’t be reached
Without first dying, a heaven
Of possibility, of freedom
From the dust and smoke
And withered stitchings of corn.
Well, that’s all right, Mama,
That’s all right for you.
Beneath the chopping guitar chords,
The Mercury’s engine stirred,
The car lurched forward
Then lifted, climbed, and soared
High over the blistered earth,
Over the gray sheen of the sea,
Beyond the earth toward the infinite
Nothing that I dreaded in my dreams.
I’m leaving town baby,
I’m leaving town for sure.
But I was not afraid.
© Dennis Hathaway
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