for the Motel Astra
The desolation without season, summer
somehow heightens it, Route 1’s course from Maine
to Florida Interstate-strangled, this narrow
stretch in Virginia wasted as a riverbed
drought-hushed. Remains of gas stations, diners,
and motels litter it, and here, July, long
month that had meant their greatest thriving,
offers itself again to the decades’ abandonment.
The motel signs, once neon sculptures
of lyric light and promise, still advertise
darkly what was: Corona, Radiant,
Starlight, Aurora, places named for skybound
destinations someone dreamed up to lure those
on their way to or from the ocean,
to or from the mundane everyday,
the heat, at least, for a time — a night — escapable.
A place or two still rent by the season
to migrant workers following a harvest,
tobacco, peanuts, soybeans — or the paving
of other roads. But most have fallen beyond use,
windows paneless, still-numbered doors ajar,
anything worth salvage hauled out piecemeal,
the only inhabitants small birds, black snakes,
wasps, and vines, cavity-seekers, their shadows.
From here, when the Interstate stalls, the horizon glows
past sunset — the convergence of brakelights and lowbeams
rising with the smell of sour crude oil and tar: jaundiced-rose
fuming exhaust cast off as though from lava flow, slow-
certain rage. And when it is in motion, the sound
of shifting gears and engine braking becomes
that of a storm, never quite formed,
its forming ceaseless, thunder dry, impotent.
The Astra lingers on as a flea market
and fruit stand, as though in a demented dream
of itself, some rooms filled with the detritus
of what didn’t sell at auction, some with fresher
produce: watermelons, tomatoes,
cantaloupes, peaches warm to the touch.
The sign at the open gate of the swimming pool
warns no lifeguard, the risk yours. The owner
might have drained it, or let it drain itself,
evaporate from precious clarity
to airless pond before this measured void,
the diving board a dull, more deadly blade.
On the concrete floor of the pool, the years’ collection
of leaf rot, dust, rainfall and frost, the crickets
and toads that fell into and then could not
escape it — have recomposed to form
the barest layer of soil. Strict plot, unruly,
vagrant narrative. The poorest, most ordinary
volunteer, take shallow root, fireflies seeding
sunken air. The road took with it the unreachable
looming, mirage, vivid shimmering
above fresh blacktop never water at all,
unattainable refraction, the vision
disappearing quick as the light, sweet
crude we used to chase it — irresistible,
that fleet mirror of what was sky.
Claudia Emerson