Accident

A beacon moving through the darkest crime scene
my friend said when I told him I didn’t know
what love was. Two months later, Joel woke up
reclined in a truck that had no doors or windshield,
his left shoe missing, the driver’s seat beside him
empty. Somebody was calling his name—
no, not his name, just calling him, so precisely
it tugged his sternum like a name. He rose,
walked around the vehicle—the tires
were gone, two wheels stripped to their axles—
and there she was on the ground, sitting
against the truck, legs outstretched. He felt relieved,
she must have collapsed, pouting at herself,
sheepish for the mess she’d caused. Where was the road?
He heard it humming in the distance. He leaned down
to her, but she did not move. He was terrified then
of the silence he felt that moment
which was not the quiet of trees or the moon
or of hot tea, but the silence of somewhere else,
of a lake being where a girl should be.
I didn’t ask him if he saw a beacon in that field,
the windshield shattered sixty yards away,
the sky a frigid wishing well. I imagine
what he would have to say—waking in the twisted metal
dark, walking round the Ford to find her
sitting in the grass, already gone, her suitcase open
fifty feet away. That there was no beacon, just taillights
and windows scattered in the weeds, the truck’s steel carcass,
and the stars they had shared, now his alone,
tickling her shell. The beacon was nowhere. He was the beacon
he would have to say, standing alone, his pulse snapping
against the sky, filling the veins of the night,
plasma, cartilage, bone—crying out for her,
her jacket flapping in the bush. He would have to say
that love does not mean preservation alone,
but also creation and destruction, and only then
is a thing complete, is it revealed, like the windshield
shattered sixty yards away, like Somayyah dead,
sitting calmly in the grass, after the truck she crashed
flipped over fifteen times. Some things are impossible
and they come true. Maybe all things. Two days later,
he returned to the road, found a two inch groove
that trailed into the shrub, followed it, picking up
his wallet, a cell phone, her water bottle. A letter
he had written her last summer, half rain-bled. The truck
towed and gone, he found her spilled menstrual pads
still caught in the sumac, left them, sobbing. I imagine
what he would have to say: that there is no thing
that is not a beacon. No thing that is not a flag
in a mute’s hand, trying to reach us. Or a window
holding a face. Except in some spots, the face shines through
more than others, like in Somayyah alive,
or like that night as he leaned over her, noticing
her left foot in the grass was bare, like his own,
and two days later—when his father drove him back—
he found, on a sun-washed hill, beneath a tall pine
her boot, standing upright, still laced and tied.

Sam Taylor