January Geometry

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 beige, of grey,

flakes heavy, opaque with silence

Snow sprouted upward from the earth

spilled from the sky:

white embracing white

Morning street noise

clinks and beeps, barks and shouts

muffled under a cloud’s wet, woolen fragments

An obliteration of the world—

its frantic movement, its self-importance an erasure of borders, of right angles

It would have been a day for couch sitting in socked feet for steaming cups of earl grey a cat curled in a tortoiseshell spiral on the lap

For watching cardinals

and sparrows hop and flitter

beneath the feeder in the yard

Instead:

the necessity of work

which meant the car

Which meant tires spinning over ice

a sputtering motor

frozen windshield wipers

Damp gloves pulled over stiff fingers

fogged windows blearing

the stretch of road, the endless highway to Milwaukee

And that dawn of glistening silver

mute and solemn, holy even—

its iron sun now tinged with the cold flavor of fear

It was at the halfway point on the thin ribbon of highway

spilling out onto a boundless 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,

tawny and lean against the frosted expanse

sprinting, but in slow motion

Saw it coming, anticipated it, the seconds ticking by

gravid, weighted as thick 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 blank, white canvas

of snow