The old man had cancer
And the old man’s wife was dead
And the old man’s kids didn’t like him
So the old man sold most everything
And the old man bought a motorcycle
And the old man got back
To the backroads, to the roads he’d enjoyed
So much as a young man,
And the old man figured what the hell,
I’m sick I don’t have long I might
As well die falling off this thing
Somewhere: this affordable, this moving,
This very last roaring thing on these roads.
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More About
Liam Rector
Liam Rector is the 1998 recipient of the Pen/ New England Award.
His first book of poems was
The Sorrow of Architecture, and he was
editor of
The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall. He has
received fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and he has administered literary
programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Academy of American
Poets, Associated Writing Programs, and elsewhere. He has taught at
Goucher College, George Mason University, and Phillips Academy and is
currently the Director of the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.
He took graduate degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and
the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He now resides in
Massachusetts.
