Driving
You drove up in a smash of Astra,
jingling the highway keys:
per Astra ad ardua, we laughed,
bungling my stuff in the boot.
We headed for Destiny. Destiny
is on the town's browning outskirts,
a thin lasso of village
flung round the centre's scrawn.
You grappled with maps, while I
searched the windshield for sunset.
'To the left of that cloud,' I pronounced,
as we tested the ready
chicanery of road. We kept
our weather eyes on some suspect dusk.
The signs weren't promising
sunset at all. We hurtled
hard round the ring-roads, the shorter
cuts to horizon, thrifting
our sense of direction like panic.
Compass played havoc; we circled,
burning our bridges, reversing
up hundreds of underpass tunnels.
A passage of crackle on the radio:
we were suffering interference,
the madness of magnets.
You put my foot down, hard,
and we raced for the closing credits.
When we reached them, it wasn't sunset:
we had driven off into the dawn.