Scott Davidson: “The Weight of What Can Fall”
THE WEIGHT OF WHAT CAN FALL
We’ve passed the point where digging my car
out by hand is an option. Even if all this ache
went away, I’d need a blade, a motor, in which case
standing atop what city plows left in their wake
I wouldn’t be fighting storm anymore—berms,
drifts, blizzard of ruts. I’d be making everything
personal—childhood, adolescence, and now advancing
age in the kingdom of winter, rage at the weight
of what can fall on us. So much more seems broken
when I’m stranded. Humbled in moonlight, the heavy
dark of 1 a.m., I floundered because of nonsense
for reasoning. Who but the desperate would argue
in the dark, banging a trowel into layers of ice, he was
acting independently of cause? Those who saw me
stabbing at the ground must have cringed at how much
I looked like them. Tell them I’ve changed. Tell them,
now, I’m a willow in wind, bending to gales of stress
and aggression, wishing I could take back the image
of me in moonlight, punishing ice that wouldn’t
have given, no matter how long I insisted it should.
Scott Davidson has had poems in Southwest Review, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, trampset, Terrain.org, and the Permanent Press anthology Crossing the River: Poets of the Western United States.