HOME /  Poem :  A weekly poem, read by the author.

March Elegy

By |Posted Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2004, at 1:10 PM ET

Listen to Elizabeth Arnold reading this poem.
 When the wheels lost traction for a moment and the car slid swinging sideways on the road, my heart

loosened inside its housing, started … then snapped back
—even within the buoyancy our bodies

made of air—into the strategized civility
I'd engineered, the wet snow falling

and the sky above that (what we couldn't see but rode through really)
blank unpilotable.

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This fall Elizabeth Arnold will begin as an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Clickhere to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.