Peter Behrens's Blog, page 197

Seamus Heaney's Night Drive

I first encountered the poem 25 years ago when an old friend copied and sent to me. Shameless plug: my first book (1987) was a story collection called Night Driving. Many of the short stories in that book were included and sometimes revised in my collection Travelling Light  (2013)
I wonder if Heaney knew John Newlove's Driving. Probably. No, I'm sure Heaney did.


Night Drive

The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France;
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montrueil, Abbéville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

                                                 -Seamus Heaney, from Door Into the Dark (Faber)

1952 MG-TD

Roger Angell, author, editor, baseball aficionado and Brooklin person, turns 100 this month and Maine's Governor Janet Mills showed up for a socially-distanced celebration outside Friend Memorial Library which included a celebratory drive-by of old cars and trucks. Not precise on the year of this TD, early 50s no doubt. Her's a 1954 MG-TD we posted from Italy a while back, and a '52 TD up in Montreal.

Elizabeth Bishop on the bus, Nova Scotia to Boston

The MooseFor Grace Bulmer BowersFrom narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn’t give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship’s port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
“A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston.”
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents’ voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

“Yes . . .” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes . . .”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless. . . .”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r‘s.
“Look at that, would you.”
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline. -Elizabeth BishopPosted by autoliterate at 8:00 AM 0 comments   
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Jaguar XK 140

 And I think the later model XK 150 is pretty coo too. We posted one a while back.  Same car, another post. And here's a XK 140 coupe we saw for sale at Motorland a while back. And what about Bob, Joan and their XKE? No hippie bus for them!

1950 Chevrolet Deluxe

 Reminds me of Suite 50 in Banff.

That would be area code 207

1940 Ford pickup (right year?)

Lee Saloutos found the truck in South Reno ..
"Hard to decide between Hot Rod magazine, Fine Woodworking, or you. In the end I thought you would most appreciate.Definitely old, but definitely not showing it’s age.Check out the truck bed. No idea what exotic tropical hardwood that is. “Ain’t been no hay in that pickup in some years, no sir.”

1968 Pontiac Le Mans convertible

JW Burleson: Hill Above La Bajada NM

JW Burleson photo

1979 Ford F100

from Reid Cunningham: "South Hero VT, F100 that looks to be getting some restoration work even as it's being used."AL: try F100 in the search widget and you'll see a bunch like this one in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan.

1955 Ford Thunderbird

Caught the little Bird in Blue Hill. And here's another Little Bird posted from Reno a while back