I drank Harrison's Ghazals in the morning with a quart of vodka and vomited them up in reverse order, LXV to I. After that we went down to the ice, mid-March, and listened to the river crack apart. You gave me three hundred days to look forward to, and then, you said, you'd be gone.
This is just another of another, Sunday in Vermont. Trees explode in sweet duress because the pastor from the Midwest let the sermon ramble. Later, college ball on the tv, and the last skating of the year before the ponds open up and swallow rural boys with sticks and pucks. Somewhere a snowmobile opens its throat for the last time.
Mild winter, brutal spring. Vociferous nor'easters dump twenty inches that melt the next day. Flooding, followed by rain, followed by snow like ash that thickens the mud. When the sky drops gravel and teeth we know our bulbs are ripening.
Gray skies for days. Mornings I see my breath inside this house.
I tell you all of this and you kiss the tightness in my chest, sing a beautiful, thick warble that looses a raft of snow from the slate roof. Our room shakes under the slide, windows tremble and the earth groans when the slab hits the front walk and obliterates the path we'd shoveled a thousand times. We run downstairs to check for boots skewed up from under the pile.
Instead there is this simple doe, scraping the air with her front hooves for purchase, hindside buried beneath the weight. Though she shreds my palms we pull her free, heaving, her pelvis crushed. She refuses a drink, says she needs to hurry back to the children. She shows us a picture in her wallet, a puckish young needling & his sister, a tiny spotted fawn. She thanks us, insists she'll be okay, and drags herself into the forest despite our protests . At last we can only watch her go.
First her ragged path through the trees, then listening, listening. When we turn to go in the front door is buried, and the shovel, so we dig with our hands.
|