Dante's Internal Combustion Engine

This is the title track from an unfinished manuscript circa 2005. Posted now à propos of my recent time in medical clinics and—incredibly—the wars that will not end. I stand behind my conclusion (see the last line), despite it all.

For Virgil, wherever you are...

DANTE'S INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE

At the front of the yard this dark morning

there appears a freshly-wrecked cab

its hood pointed down

as if it were trying to drive through the earth

or was buried a mile deep seeking something it lost.

Car 554 is not just destroyed,

but transformed in molecular structure

like some alchemist's nightmare

gold into lead

yellow into some new and terrible thing.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

it says, parked in front of the lot

like a warning, the 4 a.m. fog around it

not fog but lingering smoke

from the brands of hell. This could happen, it says--

this is going to happen—to you,

you lover of idols, you avaricious amoral

pagan, you endlessly humping whore,

you accomplice, you driver.

My passenger is a ninety year-old man

who uses a walker to get across his driveway.

Shuffle, shuffle, six-inch steps, until he's finally in front,

his walker in the back. He needs a bath, a shave

and some clean clothes, but would you trade

your independence, I ask myself,

to smell good in a cab?

Car 554 burned up at a stop light

says Barry the dispatch supervisor.

The driver noticed smoke and jumped out

just before it burst into flames.

"'Electrical fire," says Barry

as if it happened every day.

And maybe it does.

I know that the machine I'm driving

has this capability, just like me,

to combust, to lose control of its own

currents, carburetion, to explode

when the balance of hunger and appetite,

or fear and desire, fails. What propels

me is the slow burn, managed

by graces I cannot name, towards

a destination I do not know.

He appears to be taking a cab ride

but in fact he is preparing to die.

"First Hill Clinic, please," he croaks;

that's good, says my secret calculator,

45 minutes in bad traffic.

But him sitting in front turns everything.

Am I his Virgil, taking him on the rounds

of hell? What else is a country in two wars,

facing every kind of ruin, and running

past the red line? Or is he mine?

For a while I shared shifts with a Russian guy named Bogdan. I drove 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.; he drove nights. Every afternoon, Bogdan, asking me "How it was?" hoping any luck would rub off. And every 4 a.m. in the yard, Bogdan complaining, "Terrible! Never trips!"

One day I found a flute under the driver's seat. That afternoon: "Bogdan! Is this your flute?"

"Yes, is mine! No trips, I play!"

slow night—

cabdriver serenades

the graveyard

"It's rare that I get to converse with the cab driver," Virgil says, which I take as an insult to my fellow drivers and get defensive at him. Silence. Hands through his greasy hair.

It turns out that Virgil

…speaks 6 languages.

…had emigrated himself, from Czechoslovakia.

…had been an officer in the US Army.

…likes to sit and read and listen to music.

These are his questions:

Pop music today just seems to be "style," he says, like clothes for someone to put on. Would it last? And did I think that rap music was really music?

And after some discussion: How are Wagner and KRS-One alike?

This is my question:

Is the idea of KRS-One and Wagner

as artistic kin any more astonishing than

two strangers, generations apart

discussing that very thing in the front seat

of a cab on its way through hell on

a sunny Seattle January day?

I'm picking up the keys from Bogdan;

Barry the dispatcher is telling another driver

bluntly that "They need a $500 deposit now."

The new, technically re-enlisting driver calculates

in his head for 15 seconds. "I don't have it."

Then no help on your bad ride, I think automatically,

a mimic of dispatch. No mercy, just gimme my keys.

The veteran guy sits at a banquet table in a dingy room

plastered with eight-year-old maps and

photos of wrecked cabs, clip-art reminders

in plastic sleeves: a stylized finger with string

says "Remember Safety!"

while his 50 year-old working man hands

lay on the table not fidgeting with anything.

He stares out the window, at a lot full

of empty yellow cars, of drivers wasting time smoking

and two newspaper vending machines

full of unread papers screaming

go America go

Virgil's wife is going deaf

and can't abide his symphonies

"at the volume they require"

so often he sits and listens

with his mind's ear

to melodies his older sisters used to sing

when they were children.

"I can hear them perfectly. But I can't remember

the name of the song. I try but I can't."

Virgil wants to teach me so much.

We're running out of time,

and not just to this cab ride.

Towards the end he blurts out:

"I'm against war. It might seem odd,

but I believe that there's more to America

than what we hear, or what we are told.

I believe people are good."

We agree that we would like Americans

to be remembered for our compassion,

instead of our ability to hurt.

And for the rest of the ride,

no talking

just rolling quietly forward,

or in a direction whose only

distinguishing feature is

that it will end.

I don't want to let him go, my Virgil.

There is so much I want to ask.

Let me prolong time

and keep him from going into

that clinic, from whose automatic doors

an orderly already steps, already reaching

for the walker and to lead him inside,

away from the sun and the outside air,

no matter just the turnaround with its car fumes

and lingering cabbies. He doesn't look back.

But I do know now what burns in the heart

of engines, even or especially

those that spontaneously combust

and stand as a warning, a monument

a reminder

at the gates of any hellish world:

what burns is love.