Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Snowflakes pelted my car’s windshield; the windows fogged. It was a cold night and I was caught in a winter storm. After twenty minutes of inching along, impatiently I pulled into the passing lane and sped by the other vehicles. My eyes focused on the immediate road ahead. The wake of snow lightened, and although the salt truck had not yet touched the outside lane filling with ice and slush, I sped up even more, anxious to get home.

That’s when the car fishtailed. I panicked and careened into a metal mile-marker. The car was half on the road and half in a ditch. I looked out the passenger window. An eighteen-wheeler barreled toward me. Its lights flashed. The truck driver honked his loud horn. Then, as if an invisible set of hands were pushing, my car eased further into the ditch, just in time to be out of the truck’s way. Then, I sat, for a long while, contemplating my near fate.

Cars, indeed, all tools of progress guarantee safety — say we are less vulnerable to harm. Yet, I failed to heed the long convoy of hazard lights; I should have remained as cautious as the other drivers.

Today’s poem reminds us that despite the wonders of engineering, our lives are fragile. It suggests that, maybe, we should avoid the false protections our modern age promises, that maybe we should live patiently and slowly within the bounds of ourselves.

How Long Could I Have Been Weightless?
by Colin Channer

After the smooth up-pull the car dove fish-efficient
in the tractor-trailer’s wake. By then the thick wheel

cuts had tapered down the long, curved grade then vanished,
leaving undulations in the drifts.

All the way from Montreal through French-toned
Vermont we’d held to, mostly all alone,

through nighttime Massachusetts, the Berkshires
rhythmic now, the rise and fall of roadways

lung-like, up and down, the black outside squelching
with each splat. The snow fell lazy-seeming

but the mass had force to it, a will thrust like those 
of sea currents, and in the down rush the car’s

back end began to flex. The side-muscling
came in series, ripples, quivers, pulse,

and I was in it countersteering while
the coffee spilled in the careening

into through and out of what the frost-dimmed
lights could see: all murk then,

the whole world untrustworthy, murk and
splat, and splat and speed, and ridges:

the rudder backlit by dials,
the fingers and their grips

the road itself a reef and I was skidding, skidding,
tread and road unbonded into flight.

How long could I have been weightless?
Does it matter now?

I reach now to recall what flew by me:
trees in kelp shadow, gelid embankments

snow shoals, formations of a world
so much like ours, just under water,

glimpse of where we’re headed
by degree.

Four wheels on the snow again,
clutching, shifting, easing down

compression bracing on
momentum’s rush I saw it:

deep snow swashed in fan pattern
to the breadth of the road

the white rig turned over, 
red stamp on the side of

it: strike of harpoon. What fluke
of luck had saved me? Which flake

launched me to air/water,
racing my breathing, slowing me down?

“How Long Could I Have Been Weightless” by Colin Channer from CONSOLE © 2023, Colin Channer. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.