Moab cut his lights
quick as a journeyman butcher
with carbide knives.
Moab’s crew chief, Hezekiah,
held the laughter in his headset.
The universe will fly apart.
Moab thinks there’s magic,
and that’s just how you die,
or end up back
in the Sportsman classes.
God’s at a drag race,
let me tell you son,
in a biker’s rake of beard,
Raybans, stomp boots
and peril all around.
It’s no place to think
you’re someone.
A single grade 8 bolt breaks,
and you’re dirt trackin’
to keep her off the wall.
Judith soaked her jeans in ocean water,
lets ’em dry tight around her ass,
until she knows she walks in whiplash.
Whoever you are, you have a chance.
Good looks, cool and money
gives you weight, and
Judith judges gravity.
Frem races to save his people,
the way of Pro Stock,
last of heads-up real,
the street and the factory,
horsepower back to Adam’s day.
Moab first got married when he was ten.
That’s just the way it was back then,
too much high-test or too much heart.
His parents drug him back, but you can’t run
a freight train off a railroad track.
Love took him to both coasts and back.
Two girls pregnant by his junior year,
and a sappy English teacher who cried
a lot in class, then quit.
Everyone decided Moab’s fate
was best anywhere outside
the high school fence.
So, El Dorado’s best quarterback
in 50 years switched football pads
and recess head for overhauls,
engine grease and a mourning
straight till 5 p.m.
Shot once in Tempe, and beat up good
in Palmdale, Moab told the curse:
Love is meteorology; clouds obey
each wind. Driving out of Colton
with the wife of his best friend,
Moab prayed for God to send him
something big as all these women.
God slammed Moab’s gas foot
to the firewall, where it stayed,
a new life without brakes,
all his faith in speed.
Frem’s father, Faralon,
once tried to kill his oldest son.
Drunk on jar whiskey up at Angels Camp,
he pulled a derringer from his boot,
when Rangor returned the stolen truck
smashed up front from an ice slide
into a pine stump. Rangor fled
into the trees, safe from everything
except luck. Unlikely, for God
gave Faralon nothing but a way
with industrial saws in a forest
ninety percent clearcut. Frem blew out
of loggertown at 14, after Rangor’s postcards
of Zuma Beach, where big women
were tits and legs and asses tied loosely
in little bits of string. Rangor, gone
on three-to-five in Chino, left Frem
his route of movie jerks
and asshole artists. But,
with a father juiced as frog cadavers
in biology class, mother dry and empty
as old lunch sacks, his brother stolen,
Frem gave up selling powdery outlaw fun.
He entered Plemmithan’s Garage–
an air of old Israelite caves. Dead Sea Scrolls
or an engine block hone, religion is writ
in different ways, and Frem turned his back
on God again for the smoky light
of the fastest man alive,
Don Big Daddy Garlits.
Just as the Bible more or less says,
what people do is anybody’s guess.
Judith basted all the grandstand eyes,
up and down the strip, in her topo jeans
and ghostly little T-shirt. It did the trick;
stampeding thousand-legged things into her veins,
a wetsuit sense of heat, layer of loving air
attached to every inch of skin,
as if each man’s stare could lick.
Right there with Hezekiah, as he talked clutches
at the trailer table, Judith raised her top
and pressed her implants to Moab’s lips.
“Not now, honey, I’ve got to figure out
how to win this race.” It was only then
she thought of Frem–El Serioso, a Thinker type,
said to have the biggest cock in the Pomona pits.
Frem stopped everything, the trailer locked up tight
for hours, as he knew her on the workbench,
in the plastic shower stall, and standing,
both her hands flat against the hauler wall.
Frem vs. Moab, Round 1,
Judith and her little genocides,
tree lights and torque,
the whole crowd in drunken misery
and drag strip leather sex,
as Frem and Moab smoke their tires
to get ’em clean and soft and warm.
Sure, Frem lost the race, and Moab lost Judith,
who lost herself to pro hockey players.
We all lost God, and we’re losing
our long-roaded obsessions.
Magnificence alone won’t save us.
As Faralon said to Rangor,
“There’s a hole in the ground
with my name on it,
and that suits me fine.”
Moab died at the Nationals
in Houston that March,
walking back to his hotel,
a double shotgun blast
from a Ford F-250 truck–
the killer never found.
He relived that entire day,
though, bleeding on the ground,
the way he kicked his weather
and clocked miracle speed
when it counted,
proof enough, son,
of life soon beyond.
Chrome Press 