Swift

Mike Sutin |

12/22/2007 - 12/23/07

First Place, adult poetry

Through a modern-day trucker's no-nonsense persona, Mike Sutin expertly drives into the field of time. Smoothly picking up meaning and metaphors along the roads of the City of Holy Faith, he carries them to Bethlehem of 2,007 years ago and back again. Along for the trip, we get the sense that we — in whatever vocation we busy ourselves, and however repetitious, long and mundane our daily haul seems — can access a freeway to the same magic and meaning.

Away in a manger,
No crib for a bed,
the little Lord Jesus
Laid down his sweet head

There's this here tractor trailer iconed "Swift,"
a loaded combo left behind in time
that roars beneath the bridging overpass
at Rabbit Road and Interstate 25,
along headlighted highway north to south,
then east to west to get back home to bleak
and brown Mojave Desert's eastern edge.

It's painted "U.S.D.O.T." and "this
truck makes slow turns" and "we employ
safe award-winning drivers," just like T.E. Lawrence's
warrior camel drivers leaving lavaland
to drift on shifting sand from Damascus
down to adobe dirt Jerusalem,
and wise men star bobbing to Bethlehem.

Here, winter wind blows snow, dry, light granules,
like drifting wadi grains pile sand ridge dunes.
The driver does not know his haul predicts
of many yules and sacred rules to come.
It's long and cold and clear when night's half-spent
to transport goods, a cargo lift, F.O.B.,
of gold and frankincense and myrrh, as well
as alfalfa fodder for a cribless kid.