Precious Salt
Jan 18 2022
The highway was closed.
The pavement had vanished
beneath a seamless blanket of snow,
no telling
where the roadway ended and fields began.
As if man
had disappeared from earth,
our meddling presence
hardly registering
in the planet's long memory
of geological time.
Miles south, idling cars
filled the truck-stop parking lot,
their blue exhaust
fouling the air.
The bright fluorescent lights
through the steamed-up glass
obscured as much as they revealed,
shrinking the world
to this small paved island
in a vast wilderness of white;
leaving us blind to the dark
beyond its perimeter.
A newly muted world
muffled by snow,
sheltering
under cover of night.
Lit only by stars,
their ancient light
at the end of a journey of billions of miles
casting a soft alien glow.
Where a gaunt deer ventured out
onto the buried road
and pawed the blacktop clear.
Then lowered her head
and began licking it clean,
greedily after
the white-stained patches
of precious salt.
No traffic
to force her off.
No sound,
except her thick powerful tongue
rasping back and forth.
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