Cadillac Dreaming

On the morning of my daughter’s
birth my father touched down in
a Cadillac – sky-blue
and sleek-finned, irreductable, molecular
in essence andannounced it had forever
been his dream to pilot  
such a celestial beast on the occasions of his 
elevation to grandfatherdom.
No one believed this
beatific vision, least of all
my mother, but looking back now
I see the inspiration of
Cadillacs in the creamy Impalas
and bottle-blue Buicks, in the balloon-
red Parisiennes
that had been my father’s
to acquire and sell year after
year, remembering in particular a panel
on a ‘57 Chevy so turquoise you
could swim through it to the sky.   

My father’s Cadillac was a great star-
going galleon of pistons and silence;
he was the skipper; famous
down the Florida coast,
cruising over continents, and 
hovering over days of toil
until finally he grew too old
for Cadillac dreaming
and auctioned the hulk for
four hundred dollars, saying that’s 
an end to it. And so it was
for three weeks
when he emerged from the doors of 
Cadillac II whose sheen and dimensions
were even more transcendent
than the first – a divine
transport of sensors and gauges.
From the summit of microchip Olympus
the old man computed his most recent
parsec per gallon.  Then with seatbelts
secured, he flicked the antigravity.
The sparks flew like a benediction
and away he soared 
to the shooting blue firmament.

- Published in Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 1992