Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021 appropriate time begins and ends. I join this energy now to scoop up the boy and glide back to streets so familiar I know each turn all the way home. But then, so abrupt behind me blue lights flash. and I pull over, my heart a rattling, uneven engine, as I tremble, fearing interrogations in too bright light, exposure of the past written up, then thrown before a dark wind. So quick authority appears as an inscrutable highway patrolman stands at my window, surely adept at reading feckless lives—capable of seeing to the core. I stammer apologies as he waits patiently, then says: “Sir, your tail-light is out.” And I feel the alive smile, for the book remains closed on my countless shocking sins as he wishes us a safe journey and turns to go. But as we slide away the boy has observed the void that has opened in this night and knows we have emerged on new ground. To help he scrabbles at the radio, and there (as if by providence), with the volume already cranked bigger than our small lives, is Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water—a rich anthem leaking from the ancient vault, now the soundtrack for our shared plan. We sing loud most of the way home as I feel the whooshing dark, the last leaves shaking from the November tree, the New River steady flowing north, the tree frogs digging deep for the coming winter. As the song dies down, a mysterious unseen future waits its turn. Could another once shelved anthem be gathering energy? Though a once coherent shell has cracked, in the lovely dark a vague horizon stretches far, even across the border into Tennessee—and beyond well into the free lands in the great west. Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently serves as Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where he co-directs the English Education Program. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals.
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