I think of explaining to a Pilgrim Father

Somehow reincarnated and my passenger,

That yes I can slow and stop my car;

That others in the cars ahead and behind us

Can do the same; that it is not a miracle,

Nor a satanism; that we live with this.

I never summon an Egyptian prince, or forty-niner.

I do not wholly understand a car's engine.

But I imagine a Pilgrim Father's fear,

The strangeness of all our materials, mechanisms,

Masteries, and the useable least things,

A sheet of paper, a light, a can.

So he sits beside me in my Plymouth station-wagon,

Terrified, I imagine, and disapproving.

More than anything I want him to see

The incredible richness even I am accustomed to;

That buying a book, making a phone call,

I acknowledge as a thing he made possible,

And I warm myself with my reassurances to him.

I lock again, and he is not there. So it must be

Myself I explain the suddenly new world to.