Two Poems by Michael Simms

The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.