By Brian David Crawford

The heat I had loved as a boy
had returned to make even the evenings

in Virginia impossible to inhabit
so we retreated to the air-conditioned places

and waited for the season to pass.
On our mountain vacation I guided my father

to the men’s room at the Blackbird and held him
by his shoulders at the urinal.

That night we tried some vertigo treatments
but his mind just kept on spinning

and he heaved until he was dry. After the surges
Dad said he was sorry for all the trouble.

Don’t be silly, we all said, and left him to sleep
in his clothes on his side beneath the Mexican blanket.

Reminders of mortality come faster now
in my parents’ reports from the front.

Their friends held the order of the world
when we were young. They housed us,

cooked us pancake breakfasts, and drove
us to the center in their station wagons.

We knew they were mortal in the way
we think we understand a fact.

How quickly the declines come
in unpredictable, merciless detail.

On our long drive home from the mountains
I took the wheel; my mother sat in back.

At first my father directed
me from the passenger seat

but soon he settled in, leaving me
to pilot on my own. And then both

my parents were asleep. All the lights
of that city filled the mirror as I drove.

I thought they would extinguish gradually
fading out at one steady rate of speed.

But then I turned right and went behind a hill
and suddenly I was out there driving in the dark.

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Brian David Crawford teaches at the Georg August Universität in Göttingen. His poems have also appeared in Gulf Coast, and his poetry has received support from the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School in Belfast. He recently served as guest editor of The New American Studies Journal’s special issue on North American poets in Berlin.