Abandoned Car in a Field of Cars by Gregory Luce

(after a photograph)

Even in death
you stand apart,
the grass reaches
higher up your wheels,
the others are distant,
askew, assorted by 
chance. Your rust
grows slowly telling
of age, of rain, of
back roads and endless
highways. Perhaps
this isn’t death but
the transfiguration
of metal and glass
and rubber into earth.

Gregory Luce, author of Signs of Small Grace, Drinking Weather, Memory and Desire, Tile, and Riffs & Improvisations (forthcoming), has published widely in print and online. He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He writes a monthly column on the arts for Scene4 magazine. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, VA.