Learning to Drive

When my father taught me to drive
I leaned on the the gas pedal with one foot
and pressed the brake with the other, until
he told me to let go.

The car was diesel, loud and wide
and I was always anxious about the far side,
the side I couldn’t see. Driving along
the curving Northern Virginia roads

I would ask him nervously,
glancing past him,
“Am I okay on that side?”
and he would say, again and again,

“If you follow the lines on your side,
the lines you can see,
everything else will fall into place.”