From eisenrah on Flickr
The lyric quality of “Evening Drive” pulls me into the narrative, placing me in the (rhetorical) vehicle beside the poet and her companion as they drive down a springing lane, both traversing the same landscape, through seeing it through different eyes.
Such is the nature of language—and the language of nature, for that matter–drawing us into the world, toward communion with other material bodies, though each body experiences (or doesn’t) this effort in a different way. For instance, as the poet says, sometimes we have “no warm words” (line 45) to share with warm people; and sometimes we have “no cold” (46) to share with the cold, suggesting simply that, no matter how similar our collective language may be, we each speak different dialects.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the effort to understand, to communicate, to commune with words. It can be done and Patricia is really the one who stirred that conviction within me. As she’s fond of saying, our language moves beyond us and does things beyond our line our sight. So rather than closing ourselves off to others, we should stay open; we should keep trying, keep refining our words, our language, until the synapse sparks and those words take us “further” (51) into connection than we once may have previously been able to go.