This is a poem called "Bystanders."
It's another story, these first poems
are all stories of the sort.
When it snowed hard, cars failed at the hairpin turn
above the house.
They'd slur offline and drift to a ditch or creep back down,
the driver squinting out from a half open door,
his hindsight glazed by snow on the rear window and cold breath
on the mirrors.
Soon he'd be at the house to use the phone,
and peer a few feet out the kitchen window
at the black night and insulating snow.
Those were the uphill cars.
One night a clump of them had gathered at the turn
and I'd gone out to make my usual remark, something
smug about pride disguised as something
about machines and snow, and to be in a clump myself.
Then over the hillbrow one mile up the road,
came two pale headlights and the whine
of a car doing 50 downhill through four
tufted inches of snow atop a thin sheet of new ice.
That shut us up.
And we turned enthralled like grass in wind to watch the car
and all its people die.
Their only chance would be never to brake,
but to let the force of their folly
carry them as if it were a law of physics where it would.
And since the hill was straight until the hairpin turn,
they might make it that far.
And so we unclumped fast from the turn and its scatter
of abandoned cars and down the hill it came, the accident.
How beautifully shaped it was, like an arrow,
this violent privation and story I would have,
and it was only beginning.
It must have been going 70 when it somehow
insinuated through the cars.
We'd got as far away from as we could.
And it left the road where the road
left a straight downhill line.
Halfway down the Morgans' folder and stunt-strewn meadow,
it clanged and yard.
One door flew open like a wing and then
it rolled and tossed in the surf of its last momentum,
and there was no noise from it.
Than any I'd imagined in the car were only one.
A woman wiped blood from his crushed face with a Tampax
though he was dead.
And we stood in the field and stuttered.
Back at the turn, two collies barked
at the snowplow with its blue light turning mildly
at the wrecker, at the police to whom we told our names
and what we saw.
So we began to ravel from the stunned, calm, single thing
we had become by not dying.
And the county cleared the turn, and everyone went home.
And while the plow dragged up the slick hill,
the staunch clank of its chains, the county cleared the field.