When we pull into the Sheetz station
on one of the first warm days of spring to gas up,
the ’80s ear bug “Sara,” loud over the speakers,
makes us glad to be alive. We’re ready to commit
to a rewards card because gas is cheap
and the song reminds us of being young,
which today means not yet
orphans and still surprisable. Inside are hundreds
of caffeinated drinks both hot and cold.
We’re fire and ice, goes the Starship song,
like the Frost poem, “Fire and Ice,” and both
are deadly serious in the same silly way.
Rebecca De Mornay starred as Sara in the music
video, and a woman appropriately less
hot as the singer’s mother, both lost
to him, despite the upbeat tempo.
More pop than the Jefferson Airplane of the ’70s,
the pedigree’s there, unlike Grace Slick’s clothing
that night at Gaelic Park when rain shorted
the amps out and stripping seemed to soothe
the crowd. It’s no good to go back
in time. My father-in-law, an old socialist,
met his buddies for coffee at his local Sheetz,
originally a small east coast franchise. People talk
of “good” or “peaceful” deaths as if they’ve seen one,
but it’s always looked like agony to me,
despite the morphine. And knowing at the end
of a hard life that shit gets even harder makes me
long for oblivion, the storm in Sara’s ice-blue
eyes, Grace Slick’s wet breasts. The candles
on the evergreens in spring, so named for their
brightness, their floating phosphorescent fires,
are cold to the touch. Some say the world will end
in fire,/Some say in ice. No time is a good time
for goodbyes. I’d once have asked, of poem and song,
Where do we go when we say goodbye?
Now, when we download the Sheetz app
and the Shell logo appears on our phones,
we feel the energy drain from our bodies.
What will we ever know?
We dream together below bright waves of distraction
like this poem, which I could end with Frost or fire,
song lyrics, dead dads, Sheetz or Shell. You choose.
Does it matter how it ends if it can’t end well.

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