THIS SOFT FATE

Snow today.  First of season.  In pale drifts, hushing everything.  White, it says, I am white.  Unfathomable.  You can resist—fingers clenched, capillaries shocked, pushing blood back to your knuckles--as you scrape the ice from your windshield.  Sweeping mounds of crystal from the hood of your car.  Turning the heat up on high.  Or you can give in.  Feeling the wheels now slip and swerve.  This soft fate.  Watching it come down.      

Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the MFA Program. She is the author, most recently, of Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir, and a book of prose poems, The Angel of Duluth (White Pine Press, 2006).  She is currently completing a new memoir titled Great River Road.