William Lavarone: The Stretches Between Stop Signs and Accidents

William Lavarone is an adjunct faculty member for Scott Community College. He was born in Glenview, Ill., and received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and earned an MA in English from WIU. Currently, he has set his sights on becoming a counselor and future M.D.

In his context statement, William said, "I wanted to merge Dickinson on the carriage with Heidegger's Dasien at a stop sign intersection. I always seem to notice how everyone's personality comes to a head at a stop sign (the waiver, the control-freak, etc.), and I brought that out into the greater experiential place of being-in-the-here-and-now (taking a stand on being there), as I likened it to the situations before and after stop signs we either accept, ignore, or forget."

William further explained his allusion to the Dickinson poem, "Because I could not stop for death.” The word Dasein has been used by several philosophers before Heidegger, meaning human existence or presence. The place in this poem is a stop sign intersection and demonstrates how by obeying the “norms,” we entrust our lives with strangers. I think that is the poem’s metaphor.

The Stretches Between Stop Signs and Accidents
So much order in a stop sign,
That elegant dance of humanity,
Where quick signals tempt our most civic being
On skeleton waves and rote smiles,
On modest gestures at flashy nouns.
Oh, the idle courtship of community
Runs perpendicular to our senses––
Or not at all, when personality’s in the rearview.
(Unsure acceleration makes for angry headlights.)

Life greets the dead at stop signs,
As strangers intersect and bow and curtsy
To take a stand on their posterity:
Stop for me! Or else I’ll stop for you.
The dead are pushy. And make the rules.
How the limits to breathing are learned,
Between the glow of a break light
and the crack of a windshield.
(Inertia joins our invisible vertebrae to that inevitable fold.)

Stretchers confuse us who want to stand,
But some bumps grow more than silly bruises;
And some blood is clean and bleeds in frame.
Awake, asleep, and back again––
How often we woo our consciousness,
Like meaning buffed out of laughing gas,
Or ghosts who fake twelve hundred deaths.
Yet we forget and heal once more
To live within the stretches of stop signs and accidents.