Recitative While Listening to the Allman Brother’s “Midnight Rider”

by Virgil Suarez

When I lived in Tucson for one year,
I drove back to Los Angeles every weekend,
hauled ass behind eighteen wheelers, night’s
foggy-hot breath on my hands and neck,

speedometer about to burst, and in the night
silver dollars hung from the ink-blackness
in front of me as I drove through sand storms,
nocturnal creatures ghosting on the path,

my dead father thumbing a ride, his Cuban
clothes tattered, and he’d tell me as soon
as I stopped to pick him up that he arrived
in this land with nothing but these clothes,

a self-made man, an indigo bunting molting
into such blue feather that it made me blind.
Nothing’d catch him, or catch up with him,
and man was born to ride on, la movida--

Except for death, except for that which makes
a man drive on through the night, sleep deprived
to induce this image of his father as a young
man saddled upon a horse, smoking one last

cigarette before galloping over the hills toward
shadow toward innocence toward wife, children,
toward bad jobs bad drink bad food bad times
toward the idea that home could never be found

again. My father and I driving through the night,
his life already consumed into myth, mine
well on the way, the moon chasing after us
begging for details, for that which burns in us.

*Virgil Suarez was born in Cuba in 1962. Since 1974 he has lived in the United States. He is the author of over fifteen books of prose and poetry, most recently In the Republic of Longing, published by Bilingual Review Press/Arizona State University. Next spring, his sixth collection of poetry, Palm Crows, will be published by the University of Arizona Press. He divides his time between Miami and Tallahassee.