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
of making it up the hill, and where he knew the minute he finished,
********when all the clouds
had piled themselves like drunken sheep into the darkest corner of his day,
********the town would
come and plow him in again, as if he were Brueghel’s eternal herdsman,
********his thick black oxen
never reaching town, all the steady, nervy peasants passing him by,
********heading to a festival,
some Candlemas of earth’s delights, even Icarus dropping in, everyone
********in a lather,
was waiting for them just up the road, the man—what is his problem?—
********waving them ahead.
