This week’s poem is dedicated to Tom Magliozzi, the co-host of “Car Talk,” the beloved show that aired on National Public Radio for decades. Magliozzi died in 2014, and the poem offers an appropriate elegy for someone who spent much of his life talking, wondering and laughing over cars.

Carl Little is the author of many art books, including “Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond,” which won the first John N. Cole Award from Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and in “Ocean Drinker: New and Selected Poems” (Deerbrook Editions, 2006).

Turning In

By Carl Little

For Tom Magliozzi

If somehow I could speak with Click and Clack

I’d tell them about the musical sigh

the defrost makes when I turn it on,

how the wipers are arhythmical and

the warm feeling I get arriving home at dark

in winter, pausing half way up the path to look back

at the car that carried me here, waiting

for the interior lights to dim as they do

as if the Saab, too, were turning in for the night

by way of a lovely lowering of illumination.

That’s what I would tell the Tappet brothers

and then attend their joyous laughter.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Carl Little. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.