Drifts
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You imagine it will end sometime, the way your father
talked about left turns, how there’s always an opening
if you wait long enough. It can’t go on forever, snow
falling through the sifter, smothering the world. Still,
in the back room of your mind, a story, Ray Bradbury
maybe, where the snow did not stop. The people believed
it would. Believed they’d drop shirts at the dry cleaners
the next morning, buy eggs at the corner store.
But it crept up past window sills, interred gardens,
shrubbery. The yellow plows and salt wagons were buried
alive. I remember it as a quiet violence: how it first blocked out sound
and finally light, how it choked eaves and plugged the chimney.
Sometimes I think it will be like that, drifts of loss, whole hills
of sorrow, me with no shovel, no strong back to tunnel out.