Accident in Fog

Early Sunday morning, traffic on Interstate 75 just west of here was shrouded in dense fog and smoke from a nearby wildfire (which authorities now believe was caused by arson), resulting in 19-vehicle pileup that killed 10 drivers. In 2008, a huge wreck under similar conditions (fog plus smoke from a nearby controlled burn that had gone haywire)  occurred west of Disney World on Interstate 4, snarling 70 vehicles and killing fiv. This poem was written in response to that event, but its inner conditions remain true. As of this posting on Monday morning,  I-75 remains closed in the area of the wreck. Meanwhile wildfires burn throughout Florida as we endure one of the driest, warmest winters on record.

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Driving back on a very early morning
from her ex-husband’s funeral in Tampa
she reflects how the heart keeps
life surprising, no matter how much
one tries to keep it in its place.
Flying along I-4’s 3 a.m. concourse
amid semis and SUVs, her hands
are firm on the wheel and the cabin
is haunted by classic rock playing softly
on the radio. Love really is the drug,
she thinks, her hands fully recovered
at the wheel.

They had been divorced a year now,
amicably enough, their property
portioned out between them soberly
enough, no kids thank god,
the big house they once thought
sufficient for all their dreams
on the market now for a year.
He had lived on there while
she’d rented a condo in downtown
Orlando, still a stranger to all life
outside the teeming duties of her job.

News of his cancer and fast succumbing
to it was a bad yank from a past
she thought she had no business
in anymore; she’d been over twice
before to see him in Tampa General,
offering jokes and positive thoughts
while he sank further and further
into that bed, surrounded by a forest
of IVs and droning monitors.

It was his eyes that so surprised her,
fearful when they had always been
so confident, asking something
of her she had never been required
to summon in their eight years of marriage.
You’re doing fine, she whispered patting
his plugged wrist. What else could
she say? She wasn’t family anymore.

Both times she couldn’t stay long,
needing to drive back to Orlando
for this or that meeting for her job
at the theme park’s corporate
HQ. The last time she said goodbye
to him while he lived was with
a smile flung over her shoulder;
and though he was fading into
morphine and coma, those eyes
surprised her with their blue warmth,
misty, yes, but still in love with her.

She shifts her thought to the funeral
in that godawful overflowerd plush
of a chapel when suddenly she’s in a mist
that thickens fast into a wild nothing
of fog and smoke from a brush fire
and she is going nowhere too fast,
hurling into a darkness without edges
or boundary or limit.

The pileup of vehicle ahead appears so
fast she can’t do anything but hit
the brakes and screech into the
rear end of a crumpled Mercedes
with a jarring metal whoomp
that knocks her unconscious for
a moment. She barely starts coming
to when a Toyota Matrix wallops
in from behind, reeling her fragile
senses into a black comet of sparks.

A big Ford Explorer hits the Matrix,
smashing so hard into it that her own
car almost doubles up against the Mercedes,
pinning her face against the wheel.
Another vehicle hits from behind and
then another, each impact a blossom
of squealing tires, the massive fist
of crunching metal and neurons
scattering on the fantails of shattering glass.

Eventually she’s to far down the
chain to feel much of the next impact
and swoons, dimly aware of blood running
down her face where it rests against
the wheel, “Stairway to Heaven”
tinny on the classic rock station
amid the repeated thuds of impacts,
the burning and screams.

There is a space where she spins
vacantly in a void and then dimly
she hears footsteps nearing her car, tracking
on shattered glass and kicking
aside wreckage. She smells gas
and smoke getting more pungent
as someone starts working at her
car’s door, muscling at the broken
handle until it eventually gives
and the door opens with a groan
of bent metal.

She pours out into the arms
of some man who lifts her
up and carries her away, heavy
breaths showing fear and desperation
though the man is strong and
walks with sure purpose.
She nestles her head against his chest
listening to sirens approach
and voices screaming and then
she feels herself laid on a gurney
and other men’s voices taking over,
more calm and assured in the
manner of those practiced
in working horrors such as this.

The gurney lifts up and rolls
into the back of an ambulance
where everything mutes into calm.
A paramed absently tells
her to relax as small voices crackle
on the radio up front. The vehicle
lurches and then slowly rolls
off into darkness.

She’s dimly aware of pain
in her face and something
immobile farther down, not cold
as a cucumber as her ex would
whisper after the next time they
failed to make love — this is scarier,
more an emptiness, as if the fog
and smoke had invaded her body
to make all the inside boundaries
formless and grey.

The attendant hears her whimper
and lowers to her ear. Won’t be long
lady, a young voice whispers. He’s
not that comforting but she
holds on to his voice anyway. Dimly
amid her blooming pain she
wonders how the hell she’s going
to make that board meeting
at 9 a.m., and then recalls that
her briefcase full of those
months of research and analysis
is now burning up in her car.

And the hair appointment for noon, she
made it three weeks ago for that
divinely skilled so pissy hairdresser
who will probably refuse to
see her again. First she thinks its
permed hair she smells but
the vehicle jolts and she recalls
the shriek of burning hair as the
man lumbered past the Matrix
holding her in his arms; her eyes
were closed but she could feel
the bellowing bloom of white heat
eating into the rear of her car.

When he set her down gently on
the gurney his voice was so deep,
breaking through her barely conscious
pain and bewilderment. You’re
safe now, the voice hoarsely whispered
and then the man was gone, headed
back into the maelstrom of wreckage
and death. Relieved as she was
she hated to let him go; something
turned in her right then,
small and almost lost in all the pain
but she knew one day she’d find him.

All of that fades in the distance
as the ambulance hurries on. As
she lays there with the miles
reeling under her feet she thinks
of her ex in his casket and how
surprised she felt that he was still
handsome: yes, drawn and emaciated
from the pancreatic cancer which took
him so fast, waxy and cold as her
body all those nights they tried
and failed before giving up altogether:

But to her he was as handsome as
the day they first met at the banquet
she’d staged for long service
employees at the theme park,
he the head of the hotel’s
catering department, flashing
a European smile that was all charm
if little substance.

Two voices in the front seat
talk about the Bucs’ chances
against the New York Giants in
the upcoming playoffs, dopplering
in an out of hearing between
the surges of the sirens’ wail.
Oddly she thinks of  the way they
closed his casket after the service
before heading out for the cemetery,
that heavy mahogany lid with the gold
rail shadowing the last of his face –

a part of the dark she is entering herself
though she knows she is just
grazing it, lost in the fog but
still on her way home. So much
dissembling as she drifts in an
out of consciousness, her nose
haunted with the scent of
smog and too many strands of burnt hair.

Softly she whispers her dead husband’s
name as the ambulance wheels into the
emergency entrance of the trauma
hospital in Lakeland, steeling herself
for the next excruciating burst of activity
that will save her. With no more than
her dead ex-husband’s name and
the echoing comfort of her rescuer
this night she lets go to what must heal
her. The gurney slides out of the
ambulance like a ship launching on
black waters which are womb enough,
something safe though never knowable,
sure rudder in a boundless main.

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Submitted to Real Toads’ Open Link Monday.