Poem

Snow

Listen to Debra Nystrom reading this poem.                                           —for Brad Fifteen below and wind at sixty, no way to get the feeder to the cattle; they’ll have to tough it out or not till the gusting dies down— if they weren’t the neighbor’s herd left in your care you’d forget them— no they’d be gone, sold for the pleading or the settlement, like everything; you think of cutting the motor off to sit in the tractor cab awhile, radio songs slowly fading out as they suck the battery dry, white nonsense scattering at the windshield like bits of wreckage hypnotizing till some kind of sleep comes on— no sleeping in the house, the bedroom closed, the kids’ rooms too, you only go to the couch and listen to television voices calling as if to a lifeboat they don’t know anything about; once in a while the answering machine—not her, just your mother or sister, worried, trying to coax you to the phone, draw you out, but you’re too tired to tell them there’s nothing left here to worry about: if the gusting doesn’t die down soon the cold will finish all of it.