Poem for Thursday and Farewell For A Few Days

Virginia Evening
By Michael Pettit

Just past dusk I passed Christiansburg,
cluster of lights sharpening
as the violet backdrop of the Blue Ridge
darkened. Not stars
but blue-black mountains rose
before me, rose like sleep
after hours of driving, hundreds of miles
blurred behind me. My eyelids
were so heavy but I could see
far ahead a summer thunderstorm flashing,
lightning sparking from cloud
to mountaintop. I drove toward it,
into the pass at Ironto, the dark
now deeper in the long steep grades,
heavy in the shadow of mountains weighted
with evergreens, with spruce, pine,
and cedar. How I wished to sleep
in that sweet air, which filled--
suddenly over a rise--with the small
lights of countless fireflies. Everywhere
they drifted, sweeping from the trees
down to the highway my headlights lit.
Fireflies blinked in the distance
and before my eyes, just before
the windshield struck them and they died.
Cold phosphorescent green, on the glass
their bodies clung like buds bursting
the clean line of a branch in spring.
How long it lasted, how many struck
and bloomed as I drove on, hypnotic
stare fixed on the road ahead, I can't say.
Beyond them, beyond their swarming
bright deaths came the rain, a shower
which fell like some dark blessing.
Imagine when I flicked the windshield wipers on
what an eerie glowing beauty faced me.
In that smeared, streaked light
diminished sweep by sweep you could have seen
my face. It was weary, shocked, awakened,
alive with wonder far after the blades and rain
swept clean the light of those lives
passed, like stars rolling over
the earth, now into other lives.

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Today: Deal with doctor, finally get kids' hair cut, get van packed, double-check with neighbors about picking up errant UPS packages. Tonight: Pittsburgh. Tomorrow: Terre Haute. And after that hopefully I can get online from Springfield.

I am sure that I have failed to pack something of critical importance. I am assuming that most things of critical importance can be purchased if need be in a Wal-Mart somewhere along the way. This is probably a very grave error in belief, but at least I know what I have NOT forgotten: my kids, my camera, my underwear, the discs containing everything I have written for the past ten years.

Please write. I'm feeling strangely abandoned, even though I'm going to see people on this trip whom I haven't seen for months or years.