Poems by Maryfrances Wagner
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Shoveling Snow in the Driveway
by Maryfrances Wagner
Maryfrances lives in a town on the outskirts of an urban area in the Midwest. She has two adopted feral dogs that she walks along the Little Blue Trace trail every day, and every day gives her gifts--a buckeye, a tiny toad hopping by, a pawpaw, blue herons heading to their rookery, deer weaving through the trees, geese sitting in a grassy knoll, a hatchling redneck, and the changes of the season with fall the most glorious of all, providing an abundance of red, yellow, purple, brown, and all the shades in between.
I like to go out before it stops snowing
so I can push snow instead of lift it.
Over and over, I make my way down,
watching it heap at the sides,
and when it snows, air is different.
A voice hangs like a smoke ring,
before dropping through sky with other
quiet voices traveling through space.
When I look up, I fly,
spinning in an upward fall until there is
no separation between space and white sky,
and snow clumps on my coat and lashes
as it piles and piles in near silence. Once I’ve
made my way down the driveway, I start over,
pushing and pushing, coming back out
for second and third rounds until the snow
stops, and the clang of shovels
echoes down the street, all of us waving,
bundled up in solidarity, but I want to tell them
they’ve arrived too late to see the show.
© Maryfrances Wagner