​​

Wheelhouse Rock 

​

​​

I fear this coast as I drive along 

its filament, like floss, piping on a collar, 

 

highway on a ledge between ocean 

and mountain-- the car seeming to rise 

 

and fall by its own momentum, Rube Goldberg

ball sliding up and down the chutes chiseled 

 

from rock, exposed shoulder where the road 

could slip like a bra strap down hundreds of feet 

 

into the doily surf below. I think of Ezekiel’s 

freaky tricked up hot-rod chariot and its four-

 

winged wheels steered by four-headed angels, 

each a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man, 

 

sixteen faces in total, who turn at once in all 

cardinal directions. How can this be possible? 

 

Yet maybe somehow, a version for me.

Then suddenly, as in most revelations, 

 

I’m revved alive, my faith, 

a truth, I see without rear and side mirrors 

 

from every perspective, behind, ahead, 

global round, in my old Mercedes wagon, 

 

that for now and forever both 

suspends and coasts, stops and starts, 

 

stays and transports, and drives me 

driving nowhere, everywhere, at once. 

​

​

 

Deborah Gorlin is the author of three books of poems, Bodily Course, (White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997); Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and Open Fire (Bauhan, 2023). Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Poetry, American Poetry Review; Plume; On the Seawall; The Common; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades,” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at

The Massachusetts Review.

​