Memento Mori Minnesota

artwork: nicolaes berchem

Memento Mori Minnesota

 by Sarah Busse

End of June. In a few patches

in the upper reaches green

turns orange—the early

stages. Minnesota’s like

the Middle Ages, never far

from death, from dark, from winter.

Here, only doctors

and cereal boxes

talk any sense.

Eat fiber. Say your prayers.

The Renaissance

was born in a temperate

zone, with more lenient

weather, a kinder clime

altogether, where

sublime angels of perspective

tread the balmy air tuning

their lute strings. Of course

we know all along

those trees are wrong, but,

when we learn a friend might

have cancer, we don’t talk of it

with the windows open,

for fear our neighbor, Fate,

might hear. When she knocks,

we don’t open our door.

~ first published in White Pelican Review

Driving Toward Snow

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 at night?

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? Do they know

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