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Scott Ruescher has been placing new poems in the Common Ground Review, the Latin American Literary Review, Nine Mile, Pangyrus, and other places, and working on a follow-up to his 2017 book, Waiting for the Light to Change. Retired from working at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and from teaching in the BU Prison Education Program, he writes publicity materials for The Neighborhood Developers in Chelsea and helps teach citizenship and ESOL classes at Immigrant Learning Center in Malden.

Scott Ruescher

White Wooden Crosses

At one such shrine, at one such cluster of white wooden crosses,
At one such perilous hairpin turn in the steep Clinch Mountains,
I peered over the side of the cliff as my father steered to the right,
As my mother beside him in the passenger seat held on tight,
And as my sister behind him, to my left, lifted her bright
Eyes from her book, and imagined myself a medic pulling up
From the hospital in the valley, fifteen minutes after the accident,
In a white ambulance with the siren wailing, the red lights flashing.

Hopping out on the passenger’s side when my buddy puts it
In park, I line the orange caution cones across the narrow road
To keep the oncoming traffic from nudging us over the edge,
Strap on my backpack of emergency medical supplies,
And unload the gurney from the back, tying it to the rappelling rope.

Then we go unraveling down the mountain through the scree,
Kicking loose rock and small stones free, pocking puffs of dust,
And pushing off from the wall with our well-treaded boots
On a slope too dramatic, an incline too deep, to support
The vegetation that would keep it from eroding, taking the same
45-degree route that the driver down the mountain took,
That the casualties always take, the tourists, teenagers, and truckers
Who lose control of vehicles and plunge through the guardrail,
Until we come to rest on a broad flat outcropping of rock
Beside the crumpled cab of a trucker, a man who approached
The hairpin turn in his 18-wheeler at an inaccurate angle—

A man said by the preacher, at his funeral on the main street
Of Bristol, Tennessee, or Bristol, Virginia, depending which side
Of the street his family prefers, to have been an honest Christian man,
A good dad, a deer hunter, a faithful loving husband to boot,
Moderate with moonshine, funny, and a baseball coach as well,
And such a fan of country that we reportedly found Patsy Cline
Serenading him with “Sweet Dreams” from Nashville,
On WSM, 650 on his radio dial, when we wedged open the door
On the driver’s side of the cab with the jaws of life
To find him thrown across the console to the floor like a rag doll.

— Scott Ruescher