Vox Populi
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Sydney Lea: Black Marks
On this Sunday morning at the end of November, I’ve been walking the Snake Road, its tar still dry; our winter is predicted to be warm this year. Again. I kneel to consider twinned, dark marks on the pavement, snake-like themselves. They were probably made last night by some adolescent burning rubber, as my buddies and I used to say when we were beer-crazed boys.
I won’t continue another mile or so to the turn where a beater Ford Ranger went out of control over three years ago now. A pair of kids –the one named Willy driving, Evan his passenger–slid across the macadam and smacked into a pine. My wife, to whom I’d been married only twelve years back then, was heading the other way in the very next car to arrive, our three-year-old daughter with her. How sadly different my life would have been if that pair of boozed-up teens had turned up mere seconds earlier.
Wife and child watched Willy as he shook his friend by the shoulders, crying, “Evan, Wake up!” Evan would not wake up.
I rise to my feet and feel my stomach pitch. How sadly different too some other lives might have been if a certain child had walked ten feet more closely behind the small, car-chasing terrier I ran over at seventeen. I see that girl clearly, mouth gaped in a wail. I think of the fear that must have gripped her mother, who knelt behind her clutching a trowel.
A few remaining flocks of geese are coursing over. Their yelps sound woeful enough, yet the birds strike me as icons of life. Those that survive the weather and shotguns will come by again in late April. I imagine spring rain, this buckled roadbed a welter of mud, the same sound overhead once more. I will smell that chamois odor of new sweet fern, which certifies the absolute finale of winter.
I sometimes think we endure, if we do, by accident. Evan’s drunkard grandfather had given the under-aged boys their liquor. One afternoon, years earlier, the old man knocked his wife out cold on the broken ground where she tended her flowers. Or so I once heard from Luther, the wretched couple’s son, like his own wretched son gone to a too-early grave. Luther, black sheep among black sheep, overdosed on Oxycontin, and Evan gone now too. The sins of the fathers, indeed, as it is written.
In a couple of weeks, it will be the 34th birthday of the little girl who rode with my wife that awful morning– which means that by now there have been 31 of which she might not have been conscious, nor her mother either. I turn from these tracks on this tiny roadway, having been reminded how everything in this world awaits a defining moment.
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Copyright 2025 Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011-15. He won the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council in 2021.
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This piece is so beautifully written, and yet it conveys a truth that as Sydney Lea says ” I rise to my feet and feel my stomach pitch. I believe it’s a realization whose fuller meaning comes with having lived long enough. What Sydney Lea reveals has stayed with me.
“How sadly different my life would have been”, writes Sidney Lee “if that pair of boozed-up teens had turned up mere seconds earlier…” It adds so many questions to what one may have believed is the right order of life and its meaning.
There is a great silence, where are the words?
It reminds me of the last chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, when after Ismael fights with the enigmatic Whale, Moby Dick, he writes the words also found in Job 1:16 ” And I only escaped alone to tell thee.”
Sydney Lea writes, “I sometimes think we endure, if we do, by accident…”
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I love the essay as well, Luz.
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Syd Lea writes: First off, huge thanks to Mike Simms for all the work that goes into making VP one of the liveliest and most relevant journals anywhere. As for all the kind commenters, love and respect to all of you.
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So did you get this one? See below.Sent from my iPhone
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I don’t know why I can’t just reply
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There is a little bit of everyone’s life in everyone else’s life and it is there we slip into story and poetry. When those bits and pieces come from the pen of a master, they coalesce into something I believe makes us more human—the good meaning of human. I try to write first thoughts after I read VP. Thank you for providing this masterful piece. My first feeling is being less alone in my life of humanness—regrets, joys, narrow misses, and surprises.
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Thanks, Barb. I always look forward to reading your responses to the posts here every day.
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Barbara, you said it all. Thank you. And a big thank you to Sydney Lea.
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Sidney Lea’s essays and poems are, like the geese in this essay, icons of life.
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Yes.
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So well written. Sidney Lea is a hero. He turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.
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I completely agree, Stellasue!
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Yes, “everything,” both tragic and joyful as you so well know and say so beautifully in poems, in prose, in speech and actions.
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Perfectly said, Bob. Syd is a multi-talented literary wonder.
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Sidney Lea has been one of ,my poetry heroes for as long as I can remember. Years ago, I wrote a poem about those same marks for the same reason and this tender essay says everything I lacked the skill to say. Thank you, Sidney. You speak for all of us.
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Thank you, Lola. I feel the the same way about Sydney Lea’s work.
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Beautiful, wistful reflection. Its December’s first morning, as we roll up another covering of time to be stowed in the closet of memory. “Darkness is born in the middle of the Day.” A Zulu proverb, and what we encounter in the wakefulness of being, watching fore and aft and then not at all, leads us to the end of our life’s poem our awe almost complete.
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What a beautiful thing to say, Sean. Thank you.
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