Produced by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem is by Jim Thatcher of Yarmouth and is from his book “Lesser Eternities” published by Deerbrook Editions, which was a finalist for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Book Award for Poetry.

Abandoned Ode to an ’82 Toyota

By Jim Thatcher

O Miss Silver. O sweetness, O light.

O purring solitude, O jaded rusting beauty.

O faithful thing who thrived on praise.

O my sweet Miss Silver, my back roads beauty,

my tarnished tart, my purring solitude,

my embarrassed trusted pride.

O faithful thing who thrived on praise;

who loved your dashboard patted,

your wheel caressed,

your little love-horn teased —

I, who for nine of your seventeen years,

was the flesh that filled your shell,

I, who was your essence, your soul, your spark —

the principle which enlivened you,

have betrayed you this day for $300,

signed the documents, taken the money,

become your shameless guiltless Judas.

I had not known that parting would be so joyous.

I, who had long feared a worse outcome to this day,

had never seen you before as I did

when you stood before me this morning —

your doors and trunk gaping open,

suddenly an obscenity, an empty hulk

of mockery, void of life,

vitality, meaning — I saw you there

as sloughed off skin, an empty tortoise,

a paradigm of depression, a nothingness

of metal, a delusion, a trick I had

played on myself — and in this soulless

scornful freedom, I turn away from you now

to my new love, Ms. Mazda, this black beauty

half your age, this present to my poverty

into whom I enter gently now as though

she were a trusting, welcoming, virgin.

Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu