Extenuating Circumstances

I don’t know how fast I was going but, even so, that’s still an intriguing question, officer, and deserves a thoughtful response. With the radio unfurling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you might consider anything under 80 sacrilege. Particularly on a parkway as lovely as the one you’re fortunate enough to patrol—and patrol so diligently. A loveliness that, if observed at an appropriate rate of speed, affords the kind of pleasure which is in itself a reminder of how civilization depends on an assurance of order and measure, and the devotion of someone like yourself to help maintain it. Yes, man the measurer! The incorrigible measurer. And admirably precise measurements they are—Not, of course, as an end in themselves but, lest we forget, as a means to propel us into the immeasurable, where it would be anybody’s guess how fast the west wind was blowing when it strummed a rainbow and gave birth to Eros. Never forget that a parkway is a work of art, and the faster one goes the greater the tribute to its power of inspiration, a lyrical propulsion that approaches the spiritual and tempts—demands the more intrepid of us to take it from there. That sense of the illimitable, when we feel we are more the glory than the jest or riddle of the world —that’s what kicked in, albeit briefly, as I approached the Croton Reservoir Bridge. And on a night like this, starlight reignited above a snowfall’s last flurry,  cockeyed headlights scanning the girders overhead, eggshell snowcrust flying off the hood, hatching me on the wing like a song breaking through prose, the kind I usually sing through my nose: So much to love, A bit less to scorn. What have I done? To what end was I born?