[the title of this poem is the sound of the guitar in Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine”] By Elizabeth Dutton

       vivek jena Flickr


​[the title of this poem is the sound of the guitar in Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine”]
 

Car windows down.
At 75
the air hurts coming through,
an unending slap.
 
The car is old, my paternal grandmother’s.
A Catalina,
sounds breezy and romantic.
It isn’t.
It’s tan.
 
It’s hot out,
the highway is melting.
I want to slip in,
not return.
Dive down, look for something else,
maybe the real Catalina.
 

               Not really.
               I’d been there before –
               it was all white people
               in shorts and with neat haircuts.
 

On the dirt road now,
soft air brings in the smell:
Oak trees
Bay leaves
Dust
Dry grass
makes that smell:
California.
 
The radio is all tin
treble.
It takes tapes,
eats them, too.
Neil Young said that
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
And then it was.
 
I pull over,
dust like a fan behind me,
the Catalina a giant tan peacock
screeching through this
central valley,
this heartland,
this no man’s land.
 
In the trunk, a cooler
Full of melting ice and sweating cans.
I hang my hand in the freezing spike,
Come up empty.
 
The sky is honey now.
Looking at those rolling hills makes me sleepy.
 
I don’t know what I want.
That’s okay.
Neither do you.

​

Elizabeth Dutton is a California native. She was the recipient of the 2017 Morton Marcus Poetry Prize for “Native Daughter of the Golden West” and is the author of the novel Driftwood. She earned an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and a B.A. in English from the University of California, Davis. She suffers from crippling writer’s block, but is still filled with inexplicable joy. 

---