The Snow Fox Poem of Tornado Hill

Kiyoshi Hirawa

The memorial hill hiding
the wreckage of the 1953 Flint tornado
under its winter sheet cake
offers snowy owl or fox,
and I choose fox, that blessed poacher,
who absconds with my maternity,
and I do not pursue,

but commit to the sciatic strife
and being clump-dumped in a snowbank of
pain-purchased solitude, face up,
tracing catastrophe back up the slope
where jet sleds and pilots are as distant
as the midday moon,
soft-shrouded by a parting cloud’s kimono,
cotton-white when there should have been
patterns of a red lotus or crested ibis,
not the floating ash hues of miscarried poems
unwilling to hibernate until spring,
now wither-waving in the jetstream.

Though why should a fox and poems obey
when my children do not,
slalom savants sledding sideways,
scream-shouting to stand guard
before telephone poles and fences
with snow-scorched brow because
the youngest guilt-gained my balaclava
after hiding hers in the car,

and now, trading quatrains for snow chains,
chapbooks for chapped lips,
and laureates for luges
hews a growing cavern hiding growing wreckage,
and the fox has returned,
and I’ve lost sight of the owl against the moon.