Counting Cars
Head pressed against the window
Ian counts cars on the highway;
another red makes 53
and though his favorite is falling behind
only 19 so far,
he secretly hopes blue will win.
He is only 5 and doesn’t know yet
that he’ll always be good in math
that he’ll come to trust the exactness of
equations, the safety in numbers.
He’ll want mathematics to explain the universe,
but will have difficulty accepting the unsolvable.
Ian’s mother hasn’t told him yet, of his older sister,
stillborn 2 years before him,
and it will be 9 more years before he’ll learn
that his parents cannot withstand a wreck
at 75 miles per hour, this a remainder
he will always carry. For now,
though, he’s content counting cars.
When they reach 100, he’ll celebrate
by asking to stop for ice cream.
Back in the car, he’ll start over with 1.
| Brian Cordell |
|
levelheaded: Counting Cars
This poem starts out sad and mostly gets sadder. We begin with the minor disappointment of child who “secretly hopes” for what seems like a nearly impossible comeback win for the blue cars. This is a boy whose fate’s been made – a boy who will “come to trust the exactness of / equations” but will have a tough time “accepting the unsolvable.” Shortly after, we learn about his stillborn older sister. And finally there’s the terrible irony of watching him ride along in the same sort of car his parents will die in nine years from now when he’s a teenager. The poem’s single moment of recognizable joy comes with the prospect of ice cream (and it’s not a sure thing). Geez.
Language lets us time travel better than any other medium, and the poem’s choppy movement through time moderates its barrage of depressing events. The poem starts in the present tense but jumps into a possible future along with Ian’s “hopes.” We’re taken into a more absolute future tense with “that he’ll” (that hell?) repeated twice in the second stanza. Then we move back into an undetermined future based not on what will definitely be but on what “He’ll want” to be. Oddly, we jump back to a memory that’s occurring in the present of a time two years in the past. We go nine years into the future, and then we shoot back to a pseudo-present that predicts what will happen a few moments in the future when “he’ll start over with 1.” This is all told pretty straightforwardly, so the movement is subtle, mirroring the way memory and expectation can be interchanged in a single thought. The poem happens across time, but all at once. The poem’s conflation of past, present, and future reminds us that everything runs past us even more quickly that the cars Ian counts.
What’s more, this time travel asserts the speaker’s omniscience. He pulls from moments across Ian’s life and speaks with authority about what “will” happen (not what may happen). It’s easy to be skeptical of this omniscience, and that skepticism opens the possibility that the speaker is wrong. His parents won’t die, and he’ll have a relatively happy life.
Whatever the case, Ian’s “start over” helps redeem a pretty gloomy outlook. It reminds us in a pretty obvious way that endings are sometimes beginnings – that there’s a certain cycle of things. There are things worth mourning, there are things worth celebrating, and it’s all happening right now.
-The Editors
