Today's poem is by Wesley McNair
Getting Lost
I'm not proud of it, but I couldn't resist
Serena, the British woman on my GPS,
who understood I had better things to do
while driving than to think about what
I was doing, and who had the most charmingdifficulty with her r's. I went everywhere
with her, making each turn she whispered
with that lisp of hers into my ear as I watched
the man she had made of me on my GPS TV,
a superhero in a blue car taking on the tangleof roads that tumbled out of the horizon,
until Diane, my wife and former navigator,
who couldn't match Serena's expertise,
not to mention her modest compliance, began
to resent her. "She says 'rump' instead of 'ramp,'"Diane remarked as I made another perfect
exit off the thruway, "and that thing she does
with her r's is driving me nuts." It was wonderful
to be the source of conflict between two
women, but then I began to consider howmy destination time in the lower left corner
kept adjusting itself according to my speed,
a small reminder that in the very moment
I was enjoying my triumph over the map,
a computer somewhere that knew everythingwas mapping me. I recall a certain period
of melancholy before I returned to my wife,
Serena and I had been that good together,
I having made so many wrong turns
in my life, she only wanting to help memake them right. Yet I couldn't stop longing for,
of all things, the fights Diane and I once had
about the urgency of finding our way,
and the seductive thought of ending up
beside some forgotten field among cowson a dwindling road that didn't even exist
on the ragged copy of the known world
she held in her lap. Which was, minus the cows,
just where we were one week after I unplugged
the GPS, and we sat quietly at the roadsidespent by our argument, she turning to me
with her blue eyes and that old, dear expression
of helplessness, I falling in love all over again
because there was no Serena to recalculate,
only the two of us together once more, getting lost.
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Copyright © 2018 Wesley McNair All rights reserved
from The Unfastening
David R. Godine, Publisher
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission
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