Nothing in Steve Benson's "Trial Run" stays put long enough to be trusted. A driver swings up a highway toward a place called Accotane, where "a new brand of gas is to be named today," and from that first sentence the ordinary and the absurd ride in the same car. The poem is about a person moving fast without knowing where, or who, he is. The speaker is hungover or concussed, perhaps both: "The head is splitting but I'm amnesiac." His days blur together, since "each morning finds me in a different bed, / the same room, sheets a little duller brown." That last detail is the poem's whole attitude in miniature. Everything changes, nothing is new, and the only evidence of time passing is that things get slightly grubbier.
The poem is a single unbroken block of free verse, with no rhyme and no stanza breaks. Its long lines give it a breathless, run-on quality, like a drive with no rest stops. The sentences are grammatically orderly, but their logic keeps slipping sideways. The birds outside "can't keep up / with the sound of a cassette in the darkened hallway," so natural song loses a race against a recording. Stars "crash down against my windshield / at the rate of one per minute," which turns the cosmos into something like insects on glass, spectacular and mildly annoying. Then comes the quiet confession "many I don't see." The speaker admits that most of the wonder goes past him unnoticed.
The imagery keeps swinging between the enormous and the tiny. He judges "the curvature of the earth each moment / for a clue to the incidence of grit in my cornea," so a planetary measurement is used to explain a speck in his eye. The poem enjoys this mismatch, and it also suggests how a dazed mind works, linking things that have no business being linked. The companion belongs to the same strange logic. Her heart is a "guttering drain" thrashing against her ribs, and she "jerks her head around like the tuning knob of the radio / to keep me awake." She is described through machinery, as a person turned into a dial, and she is the only one who seems alert to real danger.
The poem's sharpest wordplay comes in "the compulsion to meet my fate by collision / with a silver screen." The windshield is a screen, and so is the cinema's. The wish to crash into one is also a wish to be absorbed into the other. This links to the speaker's reading habits: he goes through "the most discerning show business / magazines like some people look through telephone books, / as an index to my status and identity in the community." Identity here is something looked up, a listing in a directory of celebrity and publicity. The newly named brand of gas fits this picture. Even fuel needs a name and a launch, and the poem seems interested in a world where everything, including the self, arrives pre-packaged as an image.
The ending speeds up. The ditch, strangely, "swerves into the middle of the road," as though the landscape were doing the driving, and "the brakes fail gloriously." That adverb is the key. The crash is welcomed. The verbs that follow, "slap, chop, breeze / and hustle," are short and percussive, and they have a jauntiness that sounds more like a dance step than an accident. The vehicle ends up in "a lengthy marsh," a soft, slow landing rather than the violent collision promised earlier. The disaster is deflated, which suits a poem titled "Trial Run." The title suggests a rehearsal, a test drive, something not yet the real event, and it hints that this whole life may be a practice for something that never begins.
The last couplet is the most quotable and the most ambiguous: "The inertia of illusion is more furious than a wheel: / I feel no need to be tied down." Inertia is the tendency of a moving thing to keep moving, so illusion has momentum of its own and is harder to stop than any machine. The final line can be read as freedom, as recklessness, or as a missing seatbelt. The poem does not choose, and that refusal is probably its most honest feature. It leaves the reader moving at speed, entertained, and unsure whether the speaker has escaped anything or has simply stopped looking at the road.