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The Williamson
Valley Road at midnight
twists my van from side to side.
The headlight beams are almost useless.
It is raining dark silver slashes. I’m driving too
fast.
A gray blur flashes in front of an oncoming truck.
Whack!
Nothing shows in the rear view mirror
but I know that a cottontail is back there.
I have set a grisly plate for tomorrow’s crows.
Fitful in bed, I run a gauntlet
of self-accusation, finally drift off.
Moonlight struggles past ragged clouds.
An insistent dirge of wind
soughs through a leafless clutch of black oaks.
I am on my knees before them, chanting
the list of stilled voices that shriek
in the vast quietus of catastrophe.
Two hundred lives derailed in Spain.
All those Russian children immolated for nothing.
Three thousand crushed in the Towers.
I try to push the dead into the Chasm of Forgotten
but they will not be subdued.
My dead family joins the chaos.
Mother struggles over the ramparts of my refusal
and has another stroke.
Father end-runs the line I defend
and shoots himself once more.
Sister tunnels under my blockade
while the arteries of her heart crumble again.
A tiny hand reaches out of the slit belly
of this pregnant world
and my wife loses our baby over and over.
The next morning, an enervated hulk,
I drive back toward town.
As I approach the site, one paw,
sticking up in the air,
waves in the breeze of passing cars
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