Quarter Mile

“I used to live my life a quarter mile at a time.”
-Dominic Toretto

I try to articulate to my friend
that the line is so memorable
due to its almost-iambic
lilt, rhythmic but a little
shaggy around its edges. I try
to explain that things are hard
all the time, but especially
right now, and the furious
world feels like a long buckling
toward some kind of asphalt
that’s impossible to explain
to my friend except through
unfocused metaphor, chase
scenes and punch-for-punch
exchanges of muscle. We are
shifting down, or being shifted
down and down, it feels like,
and, sometimes, as the line
goes, we cope by steering
into conflated measures of time
and distance to avoid losing
all sense of direction.