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Driving to Work is a Spiritual Experience

Emily Kendal Frey

The sun rises in shades of tuna

I can only hear

One song

See the trucks moving

Like ribbon around me

It's me and this machine

Somewhere are the bodies

I’ve put my mouth on

When I am old

And held in

I hope words

Will be lusterless

I want to be

Buffed so hard that even

The highway

Can’t scratch

When I get to school

One kid reads a piece

About how he wants to give

Relationship Advice

For a living

He says that a cheater

Will always cheat, and of course,

He wants to find a way

To make us learn this

The other day when locking

My house I had

A vision of a field

Behind it were three

Smaller fields

I can leave many times

And still not be

Gone

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Lovability (Fonograf Editions, 2021); Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; and The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011).

Frey is a teacher and therapist and lives in Portland, Oregon.

About Emily Kendal Frey

Themes

About this Poem

“Like most folks, I’ve spent a lot of time in a car getting myself to and from work. In any journey, there’s an ecstasy to the pain of transition. When I was a full-time teacher I lived on this edge—I’d be driving toward my students, whom I hoped to assist in wielding the tools of language, metaphor, expression—and yet I knew, on some level, how useless my attempts might be, were, when stacked against the very real facts of their lives. We move in and out of our beliefs and those beliefs hold us to some sort of vision; to love and yet know your love has holes. Some days I feel this acutely, and I wrote this poem on one such day.”
—Emily Kendal Frey

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More by this poet

Noetics

You might think you are not thinking, but you are.

A thought moves from dirt up through me and if I do not
disabuse it, it grows.

To suffer, to bear from below.

Coming down the mountain I could see a reservoir through the
trees, fat and glowing.

You are alone in your one life and no one will enter your
dreams.

Teenagers sit on the sign outside the nunnery.

We are so afraid of failing we can't live.

So we leave apartments, not breathing, breathe on the way
home.

The potential is not the actual.

Emily Kendal Frey

2015

A Tyrant Seeks Conclusion in the Known Self

In California we went to the dive bar and I lost my wallet
 
I remember falling into it

And maybe kissing against someone’s garage
 
I fell on city sidewalks

In California and other places

The trees looked at me tenderly

I’m guessing

You do not love me because your mom did not love you

I understand the equation

Meanwhile, I make a butter fire in the kitchen

Two times I heat the butter for the eggs

Both times I burn it 

Just observe, I tell

My students, describe what is

The woman next to me on the airplane

Moves pictures from her wallet to her pocket

In case we die

I cry wi

Emily Kendal Frey

2013

This Deepening Takes Place Again

What if everything 
were revealed: where I was
last night. You, etc. The rain
is coming down like salad.
My sister's hair
reminds me of my sister
so much I can't 
stop looking. Who am I
to have arms? On the plane
one short dream:
a baby so small
it wasn't even human,
just a bouquet 
of light with wise
cellular eyes. If losing me
is the worst thing to happen,
your life is still a good life.

Emily Kendal Frey

2011

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Driving to Work is a Spiritual Experience

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