Original Post 1 Week 8

This is the challenge from the end of class--to rant like Ruth Stone in "Translation"

Il Duce

Fifty six years ago, BigDddy1, owner of a white Cadillac
made in 1982 in Michigan or Kentucky but sent here to be sold
to you courtesy of Carl Hogan off 45 in Columbus, Mississippi,
you learned to drive on your daddy's Oldsmobile on the gravel
behind the farm, running over chickens and chasing sheep
when he wasn't looking. Are you paying attention, ex-farmhand?
Did you know I passed you up on that two lane, following
a blue Mercedes instead? Ten minutes later, you're behind me,
still on going south when the one stoplight turns red and we all wait
for no one. I told you to drive faster. You flipped me off in the rearview.
I should have smiled. I needed gas to continue to follow the Mercedes.
Your car spluttered, called me baby, bambina. Sometimes, I imagine
you to be my Italian lover, staring at luxury cars driving by after
some soccer team beat another. BigDddy1, fig of my road rage,
plum of profanity, did the war take all of the good cars? When you
shipped off to London to make bullets, did your father sell the original
for war bonds? Are you awake?

Somewhere between the Alabama line and death, you passed me,
shaking your fist, and my eyes flashed. Those hours playing back and forth
between dotted yellow and solid, how you wanted to slow down
for every curve, brake sharply for a pot hole easily missed by just a turn
of that stiff wheel; the same when the Italian ran his hand over my hip,
explained the motions of a soccer player in sounds that felt like rain.
The crossing of knees and pointing the foot before contact, falling
the elbow after a sideline kick, he blinked slowly and for a moment,
I saw your right blinker, a inch into a ditch. The Italian never needed
to check his gas cap mid trip. But what can he tell you about death?
Even your long lost wife's knuckled hands that used to make you happy,
kneading like you knead the wheel--I watch you hunch over, as though
being closer makes you see. Where were you in 1938, in May, when Rome
was adorned in death and some Cadillac drove two dictators down a new via?
Did you celebrate or act aloof? Are you that pact of steel? Were you kicked
like a soccer ball into a common goal of unchange? Would you die in that ditch
you drove in BigDddy1? Will you be incarnated in my lover?

You believed in rules, following a sign until the end. That's why you drove
45 until a small child graffittied a nine and told you to fuck off, old man.
Or was that me? May you forgive me, and yourself, BigDddy1,
for passing Driver's Education the fourth time because you couldn't hear turn directions.