skid

(Thank you, Laura, for bringing this poem to my attention!)

Skid

by Carol Muske-Dukes

Where the snow effigies stood

hard-packed and hosed to ice

in front of the frat houses,

in the middle of the little bridge

over the stopped river,

my leased car spun three times

before the chainless tires caught.

Each time round I saw a face:

the man who imagined he loved me;

the woman who confided in me,

the child who cried "no" upon meeting me,

as if he saw at once to what use

we put those vanishing invented selves.

The slurred tracks, ringed dark

on the outbound path, froze and unfroze

for weeks after the party to celebrate spring.

Down the road, the local museum

considered the Ice Age. The glacier

slid in and out of its lit shape

through a fan of color transparencies,

each ray labelled with an age, a thaw,

the gauged bed of the moraine. Showed how

the ice junkheap hauled the broken shapes

in which we live, cave and gully and flat.

And a further dissolution, part of

a shape we would not recognize for centuries,—

like the coins that tumble down the dark slide

to the weighted spar that triggers the mechanism

that lifts the needle to the jukebox disk: "Blue Moon"—

you saw it standing like an atomic field,

charged with particles: little "you's" and "me's,"

estranged suddenly from the vanity of their motion—

and the prefigured feel of it, music and moon,

turning full force into its mindless will

then stopping, my foot on the accelerator.