Driving in Snow

 

Deer from dawn to dusk
are snow.  All night it snows--
                      or out of the pines
they jolt into our headlights
and are deer again--

hard-bright. Snow never was.
                     Snow closes its eyes in time.

            Do we turn back to spirit at night
            only to find we have a body after all?

I was driving inside a snowglobe,
                                 treeless, cottageless,
and snow fell endlessly

into the road: that elongation of a dark
too old to be a road, too slow for the driver in back of me.

Maybe you know him, maybe he's flashed
                                                    that same floodlit impatience
in your rear-view mirror.
Did it blind you, did you want to think
the incandescent filaments

weren't twisted inside your own eyes?

I blinked, and he was out of any story
that began, I didn't see the accident,
just a car,
          two cars stopped beyond the curve.
It wasn't even a story, just a bullet whizzing by--

I saw two figures crouching over something
human, yes, I think.
                      So soft, no outlines--
just a heap of dark.  Spirit or body?
                                 Did it even know?

Was it, was she, awake inside, or over us?

             I seemed to know it was a woman lying there,
             some part of her running back into the trees.

Maybe it would have been better to be snow by then.

Maybe she was fine
and sat back up into herself.

Or maybe she was in the air by then,
undestined, anapestic,
                        from a comic opera--

Miss Patty regrets . . .
--soft laugh, when it is time, past time.

The deer are safe now, dark inside.
What I hear is way back in the snowed-on trees

--hi, sweetie--
           it's a human voice--

then it's headlights, looming snowflakes,
treetrunks
                     rushing past on either side
to get out from under it all.

And it is very late now, even in a night of endless snow.

Nancy Eimers