digital art: ralph murre
Driving
Toward Snow by Sarah Busse
Rapt
in thinsulate, ankle-
deep
in popcans, napkins,
we
tunnel under night’s
thin
and starry scrim
that’s
tacked to the horizon;
we
tow jumbled shadows:
snowmobiles,
skis and poles,
skates,
snowshoes, the bulky
accoutrements
of winter,
tools
of survival for this
loose
caravan of dozens,
hundreds,
headed North.
For
weeks, maps in hand,
scanning
Dopplar online,
we’ve
planned vacation (escape) –
tonight,
as one, we go,
a
hushed migration, sealed
against
our goal: the cold.
And
emerge only at Kwik Trips,
Kum
& Gos, Amocos, saying,
“We’ve
come in search of snow.
Have
you seen it? Do you expect it?
Do
you have any coffee?” But no,
the
last folks in got the last of it.
Back
out, then, into silence.
Eyes
grow used, then unused
to
the night. Dark and light
shapes
unfold, flickering
at
the headlit, unlit periphery.
The
mind begins to drift
like
snow would drift, wordless,
unaccompanied
forms
shift
and flow, follow
the
night’s wind, or whim,
so
that I turn to you and ask,
What
is Hawaii
After
umbrellas in the drinks
are
folded and ice cubes melted,
the
ocean’s calm and palmtrees
only
whisper, do flowers lum-
inesce
under a waxy moon?
Do
vowels float in the dark?
And
do Hawaiians ever think
of
Minnesota
about
storm windows,
or
the difference between twenty
above
and twenty below?
Would
they wonder (and snowflakes
blossom
on the windshield, now;
the
wipers begin their soft erasures),
would
they wonder at this?
Dozens,
hundreds, all of us
turned
to the night, to the North,
all
of us driving toward snow.
~
first published in SLANT
