There would be an end to it. The road a slick
dissolving in windy snow, unreeling over
the nothingfields of Minnesota. Easy
to whack a person on because—tonight
where could he hide, after the car one-eightied
in a drift, prisms of snow going red? And he
a sweet guy after all, mouthing snow
like hope, pleading, just because he had
witnessed wrongful death. Well, isn’t any
death wrongful in this world of buds?
Stephen Sandy has published numerous books of poetry, including The Thread: New and Selected Poems (1998), Black Box (1999), Surface Impressions: A Poem in Eight Parts (2002), and Weathers Permitting (2005). A new collection, Overlook, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2010. He has been a Lannan Senior Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and held a Rockefeller Foundation residency at its Bellagio Center. (updated 9/2009)