Ghosts In The Slipstream

The day your wife tells you, “You are done.”

Image: The talk I never wanted to have.

In scorching steel, cocooned inside a roll cage, I live to experience the limits of hot rubber adhesion. At the same time, in my mind, I make unsought decisions on chance and with lips of clay, pass through Beau Rivage, turning into corners where Bandini’s ghost applauds, Albert Ascari telling me I’m not dead; that the thirst in my throat, the force against my body, the suffocating heat within the hideous heart of factory built precision is no more than an endurance examination.

At the same time, the Kiss of Caiaphas hangs in my slipstream.

There’s no time to think about love; I think about rain, three-second wheel changes in a stone valley called pit lane; I think about the crystals of information, fuel, tyre heat, angle of the aerofoil, a thousandth of seconds, not love, not compassion.

Only the watcher sees the slanting cloud, the dreamy eyes of women, or can sense the breeze on the faces of cool-hair’d creepers playing the wealthy pretend mariners after the Greeks had first come flying that prolific emblem — of purity, fruitfulness, and prosperity.

I’m sunk deep into my beastliness, looking for the grandeur of a podium finish, feeling most human, most attractive when I blushed more from modesty than anger. I play the darling, plucked eyebrows, earring…