Ice Cream Truck Mystery
Every summer night, although the fog turns
evenings cool in Northern California,
one dilapidated ice cream truck,
pink as the strawberry
in a block of Neapolitan,
putts down my street.
Its driver is an old man in a turban,
quite serene,
whom I make out to be a Sikh.
Its tune the traditional:
“Turkey in the Straw,”
always of mysterious relevance to ice cream,
which repeats on a calliope
with a monotony like migraine.
I have never known a soul to buy his goods:
not parent, child, the adolescent boys
out shooting baskets in the neighbor’s driveway
nor the girls next door
pretending not to watch the boys.
And so I’d like to think
this is the ice cream truck of evening prayer:
his one last daily meditation on
the Omnipresent in all neighborhoods.
He practices compassion and good will
in the face of apathy and bad music,
careful of the children,
circumventing potholes,
ego, anger, lust, attachment, greed.
As stars come out
in the branches of the bo trees,
alone as Jesus,
riding in his pink mystery,
this one man’s caravan drives by,
recalling the Unknowable
for all of us.
- Laurie Kirkpatrick