Apology to My Wife

Highway 17 east-bound is a glutton for introspection,
a faded gray line flanked so far by walls of pine
you can stare until they funnel and cone away.
We are silent shuttling this tired corridor at 80 miles per hour.

You doze, nestling the head-rest. In dotted lines bulleting
past us, I wander comments that started
our worst conversation yet: my chest hurts—my ankle—
I smoke too much—I don’t exercise—I’m sorry babe.

To think two worriless years ago we wound our
way around the Blue Ridge stoned to heathen music,
sure we’d puzzled out all there was to solve—
about love, about happiness, about us.

But that was two years ago. And we slide ahead
with our drive-tired eyes over the droning hood
traveling more difficult roads now. I know that.

And I know a music that can be too much to listen to.
Its brackish lull broke in when you angrily asked of “reservations,”
when I didn’t have the language to say how slowly I adapt
to change. It’s not a matter of reservations, I said.

Not a matter of commitment or permanence. It is the fact of.
And simply that I’m a man, scared, and that scared men…
shit, all men have issues too, emotive symptoms and bleedings
of confidence the likes of which no soul can solve save one’s own.

But I didn’t tell you any of those things. I didn’t answer
your eyes that asked for my meaning like droughts ask for rain.
I just sat there, mildewed in self-pity. Sat there, like a man. Afraid

to say I want so urgently to hear the snap of horse-haired bows
hovering above somber cellos played next to pianos,
melodies that linger like this self-perpetuating highway.

God damn it, I thought. God damn my empty vocabulary
for how a long road once was our reason to be free
and how I know a long road will come to be that again.

I could have said that much, but I didn’t
say or think of anything, and wondered
who would even want to try, except to say that I’m focusing
on the wrong thing. I’m focusing on myself again

when all that matters is that the wheel turn toward home,
where God’s music is heathen music, where being high
is simply being together, and where the constant

communion of your mouth and my mouth change
our blue silences to patio-soft strings and paper flutes
that keep this endless highway, and this new world of ours,
just calm enough to handle.

*David Howell recieved a B.A. from High Point University and an M.A. from Appalachian State University. He is currently an MFA student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he also teaches English part time. His poetry has appeared in The Lyricist and Cold Mountain Review.