Early Harvest

Bay Street, Stapleton, Staten Island

As the clock on our summer series on poets and cars winds down, let's give a moment to those cars who have given up the ghost. Can there be any doubt that cars have souls? At least, cars made before 1986 or so. Here is Blaise Cendrar's "Harvest" from the poem cycle "North," which describes a trip (mostly by train) through Canada. It comes from Complete Postcards for the Americas: Poems of Road and Sea, published in the U.S. in 1976, but appeared in Cendrars' complete poems, Du Monde Entier au coeur du Monde, in 1957.

A six-cylinder car and two Fords in the middle of
     the fields
In every direction as far as the horizon the slightly
     slanting swaths crisscross into a wavering
     diamond-shaped checkerboard pattern
Not a tree
From the North comes down the rumble and rattle of the
     automotive thrasher and forage wagon
And from the South come twelve empty trains to
     pick up the wheat

(Translation: Monique Chefdor)