My father getting ready to sell
this worked-over Volkswagen Bug
he’d commuted to night school with
to “a coupla real suckers”
coming up from Paterson.
“Don’t ever do this,” he tells me,
soaking a rag in used motor oil
and rubbing it over the sky-blue paint.
The car does shine, the finish
seeming almost to sweat
in the early March air.
“Unless we get rain,”
Dad says, “this is guaranteed
to eat through the paint.”

They didn’t take the car,
then it snowed overnight.
I got in the cold Bug after breakfast,
sniffed motionless, vinyl air.
I smelled motor oil too
and got out, packed a snowball
and pressed it to the fender,
testing the paint. Still blue
but greasy, nothing stuck.
Instead, I packed snow thick
against the driver’s side window.
I got my brother to watch
from the house: “Wait
for the surprise,” I said.
Back in the car, I rolled
the window down with care,
the snow standing solid
and glowing like an igloo wall.
I brought my boots up on the seat,
took a breath, and launched myself
wholesale through the white crust,
landing hard in the grass and thin snow.

Damn near broke my elbow
but my brother, he raved for days
in the retelling: “First it’s just
this frozen car out in the yard,
like, nothing happening at all,
maybe a bird or some shit,
then a whole person explodes
out the friggin’ window!”
And if I went on to compose
life moments, whole episodes even,
out of that old German clunker
and the body rocketing from it?
A person could do worse.

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Image: “He Went Thatta Way” from The Dollar Store Estate Sale Collection