“ Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland I'm driving on the dark highway when the opera singer on the radio opens his great mouth and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat. So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs as I steer through the galleries of one dilated Italian syllable after another. I love the passages in which the rich flood of the baritone strains out against the walls of the esophagus, and I love the pauses in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale enough oxygen to take the next plummet up into the chasm of the violins. In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs while his head and legs keep kicking. In part of the song, it sounds as if he is standing in the middle of a coliseum, swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail, the empire of gravity conquered by the empire of aerodynamics, the citadel of pride in flames and the citizens of weakness celebrating their defeat in chorus, joy and suffering made one at last, joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be, though I know the woman he is singing for is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him, though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic and his mismanagement of money is legendary, as I know I have squandered most of my own life in a haze of trivial distractions, and that I will continue to waste it. But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore, because no place I could arrive at is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience but to which experience will never measure up. And that dark and soaring fact is enough to make me renounce the whole world or fall in love with it forever. "Honda Pavarotti" by Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel. © Graywolf Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission. ”