WHEN MY FATHER TRADED HIS TERRAPLANE HUDSON FOR A FIN-TAILED, TWO-TONED CHEVY, THE WORLD CHANGED
My father wore a gray suit
and a fedora, the color of the Hudson.
I thought of them together:
reliable, austere, and decorous.
Long ago, life had stepped aside
from my father and his Terraplane.
It lived in the house
in my mother's brown eyes.
She was curves.
My father a straight line.
He held the door for her
when she folded her stockinged ankles
into the recesses of the Hudson.
We glided through Pittsburgh haze
in ghostly dignity, sealed
in the tabernacle of the Terraplane.
In the plush back seat
I floated between them
knowing nothing of choice or will
or that change could come—
fins cruising, pistons pounding—
and my father would
take off his necktie,
abandon his fedora
for a bald, freckled head.
And my mother,
thinned to nothing,
would vanish
like the Hudson.
Mary Ann Larkin is a widely-published poet living in Washington D.C. and North Truro, Massachusetts. She is the author of several chapbooks and of That Deep and Steady Hum, published in 2010 by Broadkill River Press.