Mechanical Failures

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The old man shimminates and coughs 
along the shoulder of the road 
and veers like the wobble in the wheel 
that brought his Airstream to a stop. 

He limped it in to Morgan’s shop, 
and Morgan said he’d see what he 
could do. “Just pull around in back, 
there, Stranger. This may take a while.” 

Three decades on, and still he’s parked 
out back, where every break of day 
he lights the propane stove and listens 
to the hiss beneath his frying eggs. 

He starts a bottle of Jim Beam 
for lunch and waits, perhaps, for parts, 
thinking of the years since he first noticed 
the air was gone from all the tires. 

Sometimes he wakes in the afternoon 
when radials crackle on gravel and glass 
as the wrecker drags another husk 
or burned-out shell around in back. 

If Morgan is driving, as he passes, 
he honks and points at the wreckage and cackles, 
“Sooner or later… sooner or later… 
There, Stranger, it’s gonna catch us all.” 

The old man fumes, and profanity gathers 
in the back of his throat. But before it can rise,
he forgets what he meant to say, at least 
until he sees Morgan again. 

And every day the old man totters 
along, weaving among the hoods 
and the domes and the naked transmissions and rims
that have come to hem him in. 

But when he turns for home, he sees 
the gleam of sunset on his Airstream, 
that stainless, fat torpedo sleeking 
through the pitted chrome and twisted steel. 

And though his sense of direction has come 
unmoored, he glides by engine blocks 
and jumbled obstacles worn smooth 
in the slow currents of long habit.