14 years ago, my Father hollows out a cavern below our snow entombed pink-nick table. To complete the authentic igloo look, he spray paints the banking with big, thick black lines. I am in the hospital. Mom is there with me. And maybe my sister is, too? She will tell me later, it was hard to see me like that. These are my little bothers (currently, they're not so small, but in the photo they're ages four & six). Had I been home, there's nothing in the world that would've stopped me from joining them...
Elegy For The Snowmobile & Wherever I Was Sent To
A poem by Matt Gile
1.
Flung off the foot bridge into stars, into the hard
Embankment of the snow, then eventually
Your arms after you rolled away my machine
Still gurgling beneath its dented hood and hoisted
Me from the crater I
Had made. Wherever it was went,
I must not have been able to control
Where I looked, –Dad, I couldn’t see you scooping up
My estranged body, how turning toward our home, you started
–& have never stopped,
Erupting across the sun bleached snow,
Which was much whiter than snow –that day, scorching
Like phosphorous bands I’d clasp 7 years later
With laboratory tongs, during first block science & light them
On the burner flame & wasn’t supposed to look
Directly at it, but did & have never been the same.
How couldI be? Snuffing light brighter & more real to me than stars
Inside twelve ounce beakers of tap water like I was drowning
gods. Maybe I remember the sounds I felt
Each puncture catering the crisp white,
Again and again. Maybe the sounds
As you heaved your weight against the snow, against time, the invisible
Hand which stole away, or threatened to steal, dragging me to a murkiness
It had been nine years since you last held
Me as tight as when those two gloved hands –or were they
My mother’s hands
Glistening with sweat, that first put me in yours, in the cool hush
Which replaced the clamorous morning in a hospital in Maine?
2.
Your breathe smacked the back of your throat,
sharpness whirling down as you guzzled hard and exhaled
hard, heavy boots drumming thuds
Into the earth, into the core of the earth and shaking it there
With your prayer as a splotch of cloud drifted
Indifferent and slow,
Between us and the sun and spread the sunlight across
Its gauzy back casting the world in shadow and the field
& the snow turned blue and colder, just as I was turning
A shade toward blue and colder –I am certain, as we bobbed up-down,
over & again, that I was in a place I hadn’t the name for yet, or maybe the name
But without grasping what it would be like, or that I wouldn’t be able to look
Back as my hat twirled off and notice it tumble and how the red yarn looked
Like a wreckage of itself, sprawled in the belly of your footsteps, Dad
The lingering heat swallowed through the snow.
While Mom stayed at the Hospital, my Father took to the snow, making my brothers the grandest igloo in all of Southern Maine (not a verifiable fact, but it may as well be). I can't fathom what they or my Sister must of been thinking, though I'm sure the snow-fort was a welcomed distraction. It was 14 days until I came home ... I can't remember if it had melted by then?
