William Matthews





Bystanders



When it snowed hard, cars failed

at the hairpin turn above the house.

They'd slur off line and drift

to a ditchor creep back down,

the driver squinting out from a half-

open door, his hindsight glazed

by snow on the rear window

and cold breath on the mirrors.

Soon he'd be at the house to use

the phone and peer a few feet out

the kitchen window at the black

night and insulating snow.

Those were the uphill cars. One night

a clump of them had gathered

at the turn and I'd gone out

to make my usual remark

something smug about pride disguised

as something about machines and snow

and to be in a clump myself. Then

over the hillbrow one mile up the road

came two pale headlights and the whine

of a car doing fifty downhill through

four tufted inches of snow atop a thin

sheet of new ice. That shut us up,

and we turned in thrall, like grass

in wind, to watch the car and all

its people die. Their only chance

would be never to brake, but to let

the force of their folly carry them, as if

it were a law of physics, where it would,

and since the hill was straight until

the hairpin turn, they might make it

that far, and so we unclumped fast

from the turn and its scatter of abandoned cars;

and down the hill it came, the accident.

How beautifully shaped it was, like an arrow,

this violent privation and story

I would have, and it was only beginning.

It must have been going seventy when it

somehow insinuated through the cars

we'd got as far away as we could,

and it left the road where the road left

a straight downhill line. Halfway

down the Morgans' boulder- and stump-

strewn meadow it clanged and yawed,

one door flew open like a wing, and then

it rolled and tossed in the surf of its last

momentum, and there was no noise from it.

The many I'd imagined in the car were only one.

A woman wiped blood from his crushed

face with a Tampax, though he was dead,

and we stood in the field and stuttered.

Back at the turn two collies barked

at the snowplow with its blue light

turning mildly, at the wrecker, at the police

to whom we told our names and what we saw.

So we began to ravel from the stunned

calm single thing we had become

by not dying, and the county cleared

the turn and everyone went home, and, while

the plow dragged up the slick hill the staunch

clank of its chains, the county cleared the field.





William Matthews, Selected Poems and Translations:

1969-1991, Mariner Books, 1992. Home

Whole Wide World

An Anthology of Poems:

2K B.C. - 2K A.D.

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