Sherman Pearl

DEMOLITION DERBY

There’s an innocence in these surrogate battles between cars—all the bodies are fortified to withstand the crashes, all the doomed are made of metal. Aggressors seem to comfort their victims, backing away almost ruefully after smashing them into nightmare versions of the showroom beauties they’d been. There is grace in how the hulks accept fate, how still they stand, hoods sprung open as signs of surrender; and courage in the way wounded competitors keep charging like heart-pierced bulls until one by one they stop, finally spent, and stand bleeding black into the dirt. And when only one remains mobile with nothing left to attack there is love in the winner’s victory wave. My kid and I used to wave to each other like that across electrified little battlefields at amusement parks. We’d laugh from the padded insides of our bumper cars then ram each other like tanks intent on destruction. Every jolt felt like affection; each collision was a way of touching. —from Rattle 29, Summer 2008

__________

Sherman Pearl: “I started writing poetry well after age 50. By that time I’d experienced enough joy and anguish to know what I wanted to write about. The closer I came to retirement from payroll-type work the faster I segued into a (mostly) non-paid career in poetry. I now face the frightening prospect of never being able to retire again…too much of my life story is still untold.”

Related* “Feeding the Dead” by Sherman Pearl * “Rain” by Elizabeth Volpe * “Sunday Picnic on the Vltava” by Tera Vale Ragan