by Austin Reece
I
There I was with her ensconced beside me
in the hull of the Colt driving the country roads of her youth
made smaller with banks of snow,
when she started telling of all the people she once knew
who’d died on these very same roads
and what songs were played at their funerals—
Garth Brooks’, “Desperado,” for example,
or the Beatles: in my life I loved you more.
Because of the way the names kept stacking up
and her casual delivery of each name, first and last,
and the snow-swept fields full of silence
and the heater blowing loudly
tickling my nose and making me drowsy,
a sordid blankness descended upon me
that would not let me feel or think or speak.
I have searched for the words for twenty odd years now.
In retrospect, hiding in that white-out of thought
was a feeling of comfort at dying this way—
in a car with a friend becoming weightless and volitionless
as tires slide and tired eyes close and snow falls on bone-thin trees
leaving sleaves of clear-blue fractals repeating and repeating
until white veinless arms of light appear
to clear away the scene of years.
II
In Monet’s Haystacks—Snow effect—Sun,
the shadows are cast towards the viewer
creating the sensation that one is looking towards the sun
exhaling out of frame, defining light written slant
through the snowy airscape of purple and white brush strokes.
The two haystacks in the painting glow as if treated
with a spark-glaze of small-cut diamonds. Each one stands out,
exists. Each one is a gathering-gatheredness frozen
and composed in the mirror of two weakening eyes
looking outward at the ambit of their seeing.
I am working very hard, struggling, Monet wrote,
but at this season the sun sets so fast I cannot follow it.
Shadow hour has arrived. Ultraviolet light. Still life.
Still, life.
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