Another sort of Plymouth: cars and freedom and danger

At first glance I assumed Plymouth rock, in the winter when ice might form on the bay.  Then I read the second line and knew that I was wrong.  This is not a poem about religious freedom and the Puritans; rather it is a poem that evokes the sort of freedom that courts danger; and yet it isn't because the speaker is telling us that the sense of freedom was beyond realizing the dangers of love or thin ice.  The big, heavy car on the ice is also a vivid image of a kind of naive hubris.

 

 The Plymouth on Ice

by Thomas Moore

On frigid January nights we'd
take my 'forty-eight Plymouth onto
the local reservoir, lights off
to dodge the cops, take turns

holding long manila lines in pairs
behind the car, cutting colossal
loops and swoons across
the crackly range of ice. Oh

god did we have fun! At ridges
and fissures we careened,
tumbled onto each other, the girls
yelping, splayed out on all fours,

and sometimes we heard groans
deep along the fracture lines as
we spun off in twos, to paw, clumsy,
under parkas, never thinking of

love's falls nor how thin ice
would ease us into certain death.
No, death was never on our minds,
we were eighteen, caterwauling

under our own moon that
warded off the cops and
front-page stories of six kids
slipping under the fickle surface.
"The Plymouth on Ice" by Thomas R. Moore, from The Bolt-Cutters. © Fort Hemlock Press, 2010.