A Heap Of Snow

by Mairéad Byrne

Driving out of Metro Honda in my Honda Civic I notice snow heaped in the back of the red pick-up truck in front driving out of Metro Honda before me between heaps of snow. I know it is a red pick-up because I know how this particular red drops its edges—glows—when paired with a sheet of even blue such as seen in the overarching sky like this sky arching over us as we drive to drive off the lot is this precise blue an overarching sheet of it held down at the transparent corners of the horizon as if with pins. Who would shovel snow into a pick-up? I say to my daughter. I mean Look at all this snow. We imagine a man in a padded jacket shoveling snow into the pick-up. A bearded man. Fresh from breakfast. I can’t quite see his house from this angle, it’s at my back, but I see the steam rising from him as he works and almost the warm kitchen with the steaming babies maybe one sticky hand opening and shutting toward the shutting door and a wife wiping back her hair with the back of a wet hand drawn from the soapy water of the steaming sink below. Then it hits us: The sky did it! Mike didn’t shovel the snow! He just found it there. Dumped by the sky. And he didn’t shovel it out. He’s kind of lazy Mike. Maybe he lives alone. Or his marriage is only so-so. And this was a sort of double not-shovel, except one non-shovel was more scintilla than the other, if scintilla is a substantial enough word for the difference between the strange thing and the ordinary thing Mike didn’t do. So, waiting to turn, we turn to consider, starry-eyed, the heap of snow in the back of the pick-up in front. The sky had done an adequate job, no question. But it was a standard heap. That’s why I thought it had been shoveled in. It was not complete like a pyramid for example. And they were made by men! If the sky builds, you think, it will be something phenomenal. But then what the sky actually did was release the snow. The heap was the result of millions of snowflakes and the physics of how they pile and bond and build. That this result was similar to what a man or woman would produce with shoveling is a testament to the impartiality of physics. The heap produced by shoveling is incremental too, though in spade weights not flakes. The pyramids, in relation to building block and result, are closer to the sky, as they are literally. What the sky does in the back of a truck is closer to the human even than what the human does shoveling snow in. What the sky does with that snow in the back of the truck is as if a human did it. What the humans did with the pyramids is as if a mind like the sky dreamt it. But the physics is the same, unpreoccupied with culture. I understood all of this a lot better weeks later when I saw in the parking lot of a bank at night two snow plows working, the smaller one shoveling out the high frozen banks of snow and dumping it on the lot like food for a dog and the other, larger, plough, scraping it up and cranking it into the container of a colossal truck drawn nearby, patient as a mother or anything on which smaller things feed.

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Mairéad Byrne emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1994, for poetry. On the plane over, she read about the Internet for the first time. Diversity of poetic cultures, and connectivity, have defined her life ever since. She earned a MA in American Poetry (1996), and a PhD in Theory & Cultural Studies (2001) from Purdue University—home of the first Computer Science Department in the US! Her poetry collections include The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius 2010), Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey 2003). She teaches poetry + poetics at Rhode Island School of Design and runs a monthly reading/performance series couscous in Providence.

posted by Ethel Rohan