Renault 4
Our old Renault 4 - which is sinking up to its lug nuts
behind the piggery, white mould misting its windows,
a lichen-like efflorescence blooming on the dark blue
vinyl seats –– has become our own permanent
automobile sculpture garden between the stone
outbuildings of Ballylinch where nature quietly
metamorphoses the fabricated into the organic, where
people might pay to admire the aesthetics of rust,
decomposition of the late twentieth-century
artefact in rustic surroundings.
The sculptor might have titled it "Going Home,"
thinking of its hundred-thousand-mile trip
up and down interminable motorways of boredom,
avenues of déjà vu, streets of small errands,
messages and hotels, back and forth
(Swansea to Cork, Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire,
Fishguard to Rosslare) and ending
as marriages end, leaving recollection
to worry its way into the thin loam
of the steep hillside patch overlooking the sea,
where bindweed pulls at the wheels
and fails to move them, the battery dead,
leads corroded, plugs burnt out.
In Leviathan Quarterly, No. 4, June, 2002
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