Bill Spencer’s Car Lot, Route 89, Glendale, Utah 

_____“Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted” – Jesus Christ

My wife and I drive up on it, Bill’s Car Lot, route 89
in Glendale, Utah. We’re trying to get to Bryce Canyon

but this lot, this festival of cars, interrupts all that. 
It’s a palace chamber of old cars, fixed like gravestones.

Blackjack oak and juniper crest the tough landscape, color
the rocky ridges. Piles of rubber tires climb up slope.

It’s the 69’ Mercury and the 59’ Edsel out front that stop us.
But nothing here at all seems dead; every car’s alive. 

So is Bill, hiding there in his truck, cracked smile, eyes
like stars, like fluorite, like desert candles and skin so

brown and leathery it makes you want to run a wet cloth
across it to moisturize it – until you see he’s so fresh, so alive

with mission, with conviction, with a reverence for life
among these cars, these old death-bringers that arise in life.

On the radio, America’s “Lonely People” is softly playing. 
And then Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva” chugs spunkily on. 

The clouds above us, thick as cauliflower, the blue sky
hovering over rock ridges, the dirt, dry as bone. Bill’s

reading in a truck. Gets out, welcomes us as we greet him 
at his 57’ Chevrolet. Invites us to go ahead, walk around,

everyone’s welcome here. Out back, in the car pasture,
we see a 57’ Fairlane, a 69’ Pontiac Bonneville, a 63’ Ford

Galaxie 500 drowning in scrub. We see a 55’ Olds, a
74’ Pontiac Parisienne, fudge brown with rust, and a 64’ 

Dodge Dart, light Blue, eyeless, its rear trunk wide open.
Bill says the 63’ Chevy is one of his favorites: he drove

it to Vegas to meet his brother there. And then he drove
the 67’ Chevy to California to choose a baby boy, Dave, 

for adoption. His wife died in 99’… Bill’s in tears now,
my wife and I close beside him as his oratory of life, his

small confession of loss, plays on. He says there are
places men shall bring life to the heart-torn world, and in

those places they shall hear the voice of our healing. Says
I can save a lot, but not in death: after a girl was born and

then passed over into angel-fire, after only 75 short minutes
of life, he and his wife decided they needed a boy, a son.

Bill was cutting logs for the mills when a girl, out west,
birthed a little baby boy and there it was, the sign: He’d

ready himself to drive out and get him. My boss knew it:
gave me a Christmas bonus. The kindness of it. And then he 

says, we’re born into a world to make something of it, or else
greed ruins everything. And says, that’s the death of love, sweet 

love. My wife moves under his left arm as he tells all this;
he pulls her to him and I see the last hours of the Christian

era passing through his eyes. He pulls her close, thanks her
for spending her time in an old man’s company. And me, too. 

Why is it we hug him so close? He’s a Utah bodhisattva,
and Bryce Canyon can go straight to hell. We’re spending

our time with him right now. He says a boy in Spain writes
him every year, calls him Papa; and that the visit here, 

all those years ago, made them ancestors, drops of rice
in a bowl that is the grain that makes a living crop alive.

Says, It’s a car lot, not a junkyard. Teaches kids how
to get value out of a car; some kids get a car and then

get rid of it right away; they don’t know how to get
the value out of it; you have to know how to get the

value out of it . . . and we didn’t get to where we are, he
says to her and me, without people like you, and me.

 

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Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. He has work in Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The MacGuffin.