Kind Of A Hurricane Press
He leaves the
hospital for the last time, unable to forget her face.
Half the country was locked in
an arctic vortex that night, wind chill readings in the dozens of degrees
below-zero, but he’d driven home—an hour’s drive over The Heights—with the
window fully open, his hands frozen on the wheel, his eyes blinded, the radio
blaring some almost incomprehensible ‘60s tune about love and a forever he can
only just barely recall.
When he reached the top of The
Heights he remembered how he’d once stopped at the pull-off on a mid-summer
night, sat quietly for an hour staring up at Venus, and written a poem about a
homesick Canadian dying to get home, flying across the median, sailing over the
ditch, and crashing in flames into the granite embankment. After all the years
of reading and reciting the poem, it had ceased to be a fiction. He never
crossed The Heights without recalling it.
Now, years and years and half a
year later, flying home, frozen, he forces himself to decelerate when
the headstone grey granite, harder than mere rock, looms, beckoning.