"Driving Back From Crotched Mountain, Winter Storm, New Year's Eve"
Click here to listen to John Hodgen read this poem.
The man in front of me—what's he doing?—pulls over, no signal, ******** to the side of the road,
gets out, begins sloughing his way, stooped and bent against the wind,
********to what I presume
is his driveway winding up and around the small box of a cabin
********that is his home.
He is waving me around, annoyed somehow, his left arm swooping low
********above the snow
in a way no man younger than himself would wave someone around,
********as if he'd been a soldier
or farmer all his life, as if he lived a little closer to the ground, his arm
********a sweeping scythe,
as if it were his holy job to wave the world to go around, as if he were
********my father, consigned
instead of hell to Peterborough, New Hampshire, where it turns out
********it always snows,
where he'd have to shovel the length of his driveway before his car would
********even have a prayer
John Hodgen's Grace won the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
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