SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

Salt trucks out on the street. Black ice.

Noah’s wife salted like Carthage.

The town encased in a glass patina.

The storefront windowpanes are jealous.

Orange pygmy snowplows

seeding salt and gravel on the sidewalks.

Ladybugs about their business.

Butter on a black mirror smeared

like a palette of streetlights and logos.

One misstep and you’re on your ass again.

The night is sumi ink.

There are no revisions.

Who didn’t expect

to die on the highway tonight?

Whose heart breaks like a poppy

glazed by the freezing rain?

Who's been broken off

the brittle tree of life

like a twig that snaps underfoot

to give the nightbirds under the eaves a warning

and the presence of something foreboding away?

Accidental, trivial, random, happenstantial,

how much that was imperatively crucial

perished for nothing tonight

like the driver of a tractor-trailer

that jack-knifed on the backroad to Plevna,

haemorrhaging alone miles from the nearest farm

while the ice fell from the aspen trees

like eggshell light bulbs

and forsaken chandeliers?

I stare blankly through a veil

of freeze-framed tears

crudely woven on the loom of the bug screen

at the subatomic causes

of astronomical catastrophes

and think of the collateral damage

of something so slight as a drop in the temperature.

Three degrees warmer and you would have lived.

But just as wet and three degrees colder

and you would have lived.

No malice. No mercy.

No one to look over the fallen sparrow.

You’re a casualty, you’re a tragedy,

you’re a victim, a bitter fact, an act of God

in a godless universe

that’s anything but self-evident

to those who can’t see in it

either a blessing or a curse

or believe the worst

always works out for the good, better, best

of a cold front that was just passing through.

Who added their emptiness to the abyss tonight

as if they were returning their lives

like shattered windshields

to the frozen watersheds

they took them from

as their broken bodies freeze to the pavement

until they’re discovered in the morning

and chipped away

like a statue by Michelangelo

who could see form in stone

and where the cracks in the marble lay

like fault lines and dangerous stretches

of asphalt highway we fall through

when the earth gapes

and swallows us whole

like a snake you can’t train

to bite other people

that eats its own reflexively.

I’ve tried to reconcile absurdities.

I’ve tried to measure the worth of a human,

noble and ignominious alike,

against the indignity of the way we die

but the scales limp with a heavy foot

as if they’d had a stroke

that paralysed them on their left side,

and left them with no feeling on the right.

PATRICK WHITE