five poems

by Ihor Pidhainey

Waiting at the Light

It is not the missed light,

where it does amber at the dangerous left,

that causes me pause,

what are two or three more minutes

of symphonic strains on the car’s radio

in the wider scheme of the universe,

as the traffic thins and Haydn plays

the first of his large Parisian symphonies

before a packed house in 1786

of nobles, ecclesiasts and amateur musicians,

somewhere their King frets over

the wishes of Americans

against the demands of mad King George,

and a budget that wends its way to grief

for that king, his wife and the old regime,

but in that moment before the sacrificial rites,

Haydn was king of composers,

his lugubrious Bear symphony

bore out that Mozart had been eclipsed

in the City of Light, briefly,

before heads rolled and the world

convulsed, and the light

changed to green, and I could return

chez moi to the moment before the revolution struck.

Two Trucks

Two trucks rolled down the hill,

they could not pause as brakes

would not stop against the iced-down

lanes. Their drivers did not worry

where’d they’d end – in a lake

or a deep ravine, or a combo

of the two. That is they were drugged,

left for dead, and - some coincidence -

two different crimes run by different

criminals for two completely

unrelated monster crime organizations.

Perhaps they knew each other in passing,

at a casino, a truck stop, a timeshare

in Miami, someplace inconspicuous,

where they’d eat boiled peanuts

and not notice what the other did.

What is your job, one might ask,

or what line of work are you in, and

the answer would be something like

trucking or garbage disposal or gambling

or vices that you are not privy to,

and that would start the feud,

two men beefing. They would

resolve the beef the way men always do,

at a barbeque or in a gym or in the streets

and one might come out unscathed

and the other might just survive

and not a politician or policeman or passerby

would notice, if no photographer,

nor campy camera happy cellphone dweller

did shoot and record the bludgeoning,

the bleeding, the expiration date exposed

for one or two victims by and about

one or two perpetrators. Were there only two?

Or was it four? And if someone was watching,

Was it six or six million? The number of victims

is irrelevant you might say, but then you breathe

the news and you realize that it was just a drone

or just a couple men in green, or just two trucks

careening down a road, brakes done in,

over whose limp dick shot quickly quicker,

and whose pager was being paged.

Our cars are hours away?

(Words and Sounds, man)

How do you say in Canadian

our?

How does the Ohioan let slide

are?

How does a boy from Bama punch out

hours?

Beep the horn,

whip the wheel

wipe the strip behind the bar.

I’m only dancing,

you promised,

down the road,

and I’ll be back

you said,

after a drink with the boys.

famous last words.

Angola

On the eerie flat between lake and forest,

we would glide into Angola, late or early

in our drive from Alabama to Ontario.

I must have been three when we first

stopped for gas, coffee and a cigarette break.

Perhaps it was Summer and sunny,

on our route to Youngstown in Ohio.

The old Buick must have slid to a halt

when by the age of nine the four of us

would pour out into expectations

of the whizzing cars that raced

beneath the overpass encased in glass.

Cookies and milk or boxed sandwiches

and pizza slices with apples and peaches and pears,

while our mother would feed the baby

from the bottle, For Twenty minutes

my father would have disappeared, then

he reappears at the coffee counter, smoke

in hand. We were all passing through,

charging for the Buick to resume our route

homeward in either direction, east or west.

Digging Out and Driving On

We left early Saturday morning

before traffic could build

before the day would get long.

Ten days we had passed in this real winter-land,

with snow and drifts and streets unfit for my southern ride.

We celebrated Xmas and New Years,

subdued and indoors, with family and a couple of friends.

No surfeit, no great heavy weight,

quiet downtime.

The road was good, and it was sunny,

and the border’s flags went straight into New York state,

past Buffalo and half-way to Erie

when the first wave of storm slid in softly,

gently we drove for an inch, two, three

and we moved to a leisured drive, single-file on I-90,

all off-ramps to Erie two feet deep,

and we thought this is extreme lake-effect,

we’ll hurdle south to the clarity beyond.

I-79 South was caked, iced in parts, cars parked off to the side,

as we slowed to 20 mph or less. The light

was dead, white-out. Swaying inside a plastic-encased globe of snow,

crawling with high head beams and flashers,

peering through the window with wipers in effect-

ively smearing sand and salt across the grain.

I need to pee, he said, and we pulled off to a mostly well-cleared

service center. Done his business, we returned to flight,

pulling back, but the front wheels began to spin and we

lunged back, then swung round, then back again, until

three large men poured three bags of salt

and we made our getaway onto the not yet quite slick

ice-rink, sliding down until the suburbs of Pittsburgh

welcomed us with their own shifts of ice and sleet.

While my son slept, I wondered whether the worst was past,

and there was hope in the road ahead,

but the forecast read give it all up,

you have entered the land of the dead,

and there is no turning back.

I woke my son at six for the first stage before the battering

of the Polar Vortex. Hang on, I thought I shouted

as the rage of the planet unleashed a frigid hell on earth,

the vision of Dante, not Milton, razed a path across our route,

the monsters that you dreamt come vivid and without virtue.

The fever broke by the time we entered North Carolina.

and we drove through Greensville and 85 to enter Atlanta,

dead tired, midnight-bound, set for bed at home.

BIO: Born in Canada, Ihor Pidhainy lives and works in the American South. His poetry has appeared in various journals such as Washington Square Review, In Parentheses, The Louisville Review and Merion West. His poem "A Teacher looks up" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Follow him pidhainyihor (Instagram) and ipidhainy.bsky.social