Getting Lucky
April 1 2015


They would park an old Pontiac
out on the ice
in early April.
Or a Rambler, a Nash
your dad’s Studebaker,

a window cracked for air.
The Knights of Columbus, or local Rotarians
taking bets on the break-up
for annual charity.

When it would bury its nose
in softening slush,
slip slowly under, then quickly plunge
down to the muzzy muck,
a trail of bubbles, burbling-up
in its wake.

Sometimes

it would hang there, teetering,

tantalizing, teasingly.

Before the weight of water
swamped the empty compartment
and pulled it down,

soundlessly slipping from sight.

Someone’s treasured car

once tuned, and oiled, and buffed

now unceremoniously sunk

for a small cash prize.
And left behind,

the dream-catcher
that promised luck

dangling from the rear-view mirror.
The torn bench seat
where an awkward boy, ingenuous girl
first made love,
engine running, glass steamed-up
some hot and troubled night.

So the lakebed is littered with cars,
Ford Roadsters

and old De Sotos

and totalled Chevy Coupes,
stripped junkers, frozen in time

in the cold dense stillness.

An iron reef
of blooming weeds, shifting silt.

Where stalled traffic
sits grid-locked,

streamlined fish, darting past

with quick powerful flicks.

And fishing shacks
are firmly planted,
caught by an early thaw.
Almost upright,
as if he'd just stepped out to pee,

line left

hooked, and baited, and set.
Where beer bottles
were chucked by drunks,
and odds and ends
are stuck in mud,
and snow machines
are still gassed-up
but dead.

A postcard lake,
with a graveyard
of vintage cars
concealed in its depths.

I lost my bet, this year.
The Pontiac
of budding romance, and innocence lost
has yet to meet its end.
And even then
will still be there,
sinking-in to the muck.

That dangling thing, the back bench seat,
where fish spawn

and weeds spread,
and memory’s left

to rust.

Except it turns out
no one got lucky.
An unsold ticket
and there was no winner
the day the car went through.

I would never have known about this charming northern small-town ritual if I weren't a regular listener to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. ...Of course, Lake Wobegon is a fictional place, and Keillor has been known to exaggerate ;-)!

I started out with no idea where this poem would go. But I couldn't resist the litany of old cars. (All the while manfully resisting my favourite: no Buicks in this poem!)

And there is a familiar trope here that must have been fermenting away in my subconscious: the idea of concealment; of deceptive surfaces. All this junk, at the bottom of the lake: like some strange arrested Atlantis; an empty city, hidden from view. You could certainly read an environmental message into this, as well: our immense piles of garbage; out of sight, out of mind.

And fooling around in the back seat was really pretty inevitable: what else do you think of with big vintage American cars, after all? So once I went there, the cute double entendre of getting lucky was a natural.

But despite the playful narrative and slightly amusing air, I think the poem contains the usual ambivalence and regret that are part of memory: there in the troubled night and lost innocence; and there in the sense of obsolescence and passage of time, with old things vanishing as if they never existed. And this edge of darkness is also there in the ominous lake-bed, which is muzzy and mucky and cold and weedy and dense; not to mention a graveyard.

I wonder what's dangling from the rear-view mirror. I have no idea. But I think this unknown object contains the idea of something very personal and meaningful that is scorned, ignored, abandoned: like our ignominious end, when the world moves on, and we are soon forgotten; like fish spawning, where we once rutted; like our valued things, overgrown by weeds. Like discontinued cars, no one recognizes any more.

(Sorry about all this darkness. But if I wanted to write all unicorns and rainbows, I'd be writing for Hallmark.)