A white car overtakes me on a bend,
and I read its skull-fractured flank,
and consider how a car's story can be read
from the eggshell crushings
and debrided wounds on its chassis.

Yet, how often do we read each other?
...the strange indentations, the key scrapes
and the panel-beatings on our own
frail bodywork?
I think of the old people I know,
with knobbled and skewed joints, twisted digits
like the bamboo snakes at the fairground...
or bent as a bracken-hook, toward the soil,
wherein a lifetime has been dug, planted, watered...
or the old soldier who holds his head high,
his chin square and defiant against the irreverence
that the cruel enemy, Time, can spew out.
Or another, contorted lifelong,
who stretches a smile like a gangling chick bursting forth
from its unforgiving shell.

And I touch you with my eyes square;
I finger your lovable fractures, and beautiful and pale folds,
and the cornered jaw set forward,
the creases cutting the sides of your smile,
cutting away from your sad amber eyes;
the tired stoop of your shoulders upon which,
I suppose,
countless unliftable slabs of stone have been carried;
your hands, like muscular, flat-footed dancers,
striding, soaring...

And I wonder if you see my own scars and breaks,
grazes and skin-tears;
whether you see the ache that sadness injects into my hands;
whether the knots that longing ties in my belly
leave their own stretchmarks and bruises;
whether the twistings and leanings of life
have warped my frame in the same way
that my car was once slewed in a crash.
I wonder whether you can tell
that the chassis has been slammed slightly awry?
Whether you can see the weak spots
where rust has penetrated
and ruthlessly eaten away
the true metal underneath?