WEBVTT

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This is a poem
called "Bystanders."

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It's another story,
these first poems

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are all stories of the sort.

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When it snowed hard, cars
failed at the hairpin turn

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above the house.

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They'd slur offline and drift
to a ditch or creep back down,

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the driver squinting out
from a half open door,

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his hindsight glazed by snow on
the rear window and cold breath

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on the mirrors.

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Soon he'd be at the
house to use the phone,

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and peer a few feet
out the kitchen window

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at the black night
and insulating snow.

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Those were the uphill cars.

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One night a clump of them
had gathered at the turn

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and I'd gone out to make
my usual remark, something

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smug about pride
disguised as something

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about machines and snow,
and to be in a clump myself.

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Then over the hillbrow
one mile up the road,

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came two pale
headlights and the whine

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of a car doing 50
downhill through four

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tufted inches of snow atop
a thin sheet of new ice.

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That shut us up.

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And we turned enthralled like
grass in wind to watch the car

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and all its people die.

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Their only chance would
be never to brake,

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but to let the
force of their folly

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carry them as if it were a
law of physics where it would.

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And since the hill was straight
until the hairpin turn,

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they might make it that far.

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And so we unclumped fast
from the turn and its scatter

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of abandoned cars and down the
hill it came, the accident.

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How beautifully shaped
it was, like an arrow,

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this violent privation
and story I would have,

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and it was only beginning.

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It must have been going
70 when it somehow

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insinuated through the cars.

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We'd got as far away
from as we could.

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And it left the
road where the road

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left a straight downhill line.

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Halfway down the Morgans'
folder and stunt-strewn meadow,

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it clanged and yard.

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One door flew open
like a wing and then

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it rolled and tossed in the
surf of its last momentum,

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and there was no noise from it.

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Than any I'd imagined in
the car were only one.

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A woman wiped blood from his
crushed face with a Tampax

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though he was dead.

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And we stood in the
field and stuttered.

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Back at the turn,
two collies barked

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at the snowplow with its
blue light turning mildly

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at the wrecker, at the police
to whom we told our names

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and what we saw.

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So we began to ravel from the
stunned, calm, single thing

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we had become by not dying.

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And the county cleared the
turn, and everyone went home.

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And while the plow
dragged up the slick hill,

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the staunch clank of its chains,
the county cleared the field.

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