It was one of those midwestern snowstorms
that swallows the world,
slows time down with the weight of beauty.
A sudden white
erasing weeks of brown, of grey.
Flakes heavy, opaque with silence.
Snow sprouted upward from the earth
and spilled from the sky,
white meeting white.
The usual street noise,
clinks and beeps and shouts,
muffled under a cloud’s fleecy fragments.
An obliteration of the world—
its frantic movement,
its self-importance.
It would have been a day
for couch sitting in socked feet,
for steaming cups of earl grey,
For watching the cardinals
and sparrows flitter
beneath the feeder in the yard.
Instead
there was the necessity of work,
which meant the car,
Which meant tires spinning over ice,
sputtering motor,
frozen windshield wipers,
Damp gloves pulled over stiff fingers,
fogged windows blearing
the stretch of road, an endless highway to Milwaukee.
And that morning of sparkling silver,
mute and solemn, holy even,
became tinged with the flavor of fear.
It was at the halfway point on the thin ribbon of highway,
spilling out onto a boundless, blank field
of snowdrifts blowing over broken cornstalks,
As semis roared and belched black,
indignant pickups whizzed past
on the left lane,
When she saw it—the buck.
Muscular with branched antlers,
brown and lean against the frosted expanse,
sprinting, but in slow motion.
Saw it coming, anticipated it, the seconds ticking by
weighted and gravid as snowflakes
the sedan in front of her speeding fast, faster, too fast.
The trajectory already mapped out, advancing
like some awful geometry equation,
barreling toward a single, inevitable solution,
Without pity, without mercy,
that could culminate only in the skidding of tires,
in fur and flesh and rolled back eyes,
In a shock of red
on the white canvas
of snow.
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