Hands tighten on the wheel as I descend
into grimy dim.  Some of the lamps
are out.  My skin feels damp.
Red lights, bright on the downslope,
soften on the rise.  I grope
toward common sense, the light at the end.

It has been a long time since I drove through the Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore.  I’m not sure what brought it to mind; perhaps I was thinking of images of descent in general.  For many years I lived in Philadelphia while my mother lived in Greenbelt, Maryland.  The Harbor Tunnel was the logical way to go, but in the early years going down in made me nervous.

As you can see, I wrote this partly as an experiment with rhyme.

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