For a Minute
Imagining my father’s death is a journey
driving across my old Wyoming haunt
helps. Here, nothing stops the highway cold,
as if nothing is something large—larger than life.
But with a car, you feel the warmth of distance
mastered, as if you are imagined by someone else
a complete unit, a round number counting the line.
Other cars in purpose too, in train, like an ant following
pheromone trail into horizon. Crossing, we are of one
place—the land beggaring all. The land bread. He made me
feel like a crumb of something. Or part of a sandwich
yet to be stacked in cairn. He made me doubt winter
is often just starving grandly, with panache. In life
he made me wonder if Wyoming knew he’d die,
and even now it’s hard to think of him leaving for good,
the hoary grass foreground of a fixed view.
But nearby a drunken, snowfence snake teeters
the sky’s sad, snowy maw, its toothless jaw wide.
The sky’s, that is, as the sky here is
hungry, ever swallowing things whole.
Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. Recent work can be found in Cimarron Review, Midway Journal, The Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Superstition Review, and Zone 3, among other journals. She is the author of the micro-chapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).
Header image by kojihirano, courtesy Shutterstock.
