Through Ice, Snow, Sleet and Sonnets

Last Sunday I was headed to Haverhill on I-495 in the midst of a driving flurry. At least that’s what the weatherman had predicted the day before. But as is the case more often than not, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the snow blows. It was raging out there, but since it was Sunday and not a workday, the plows were taking their time cleaning up the highway. After all there were no businesses awaiting this endangered traffic: only one of the busiest travel days in the year with stressed-out families returning from the holidays. And there to my left was one of them who without any attention at all to my presence had decided my lane was the better road less traveled.

December Interstate

495 was slick like licorice.
A snow plow weaved between the dotted lines
which rendered now just Morse Code gibberish.
I scanned their messages while eastern pines
passed my peripheral illusions less
than forty, thirty, twenty, miles an hour.
Then suddenly this measured wilderness
was interrupted by the drifting power
of some Accord oblivious to me.
I blew my horn as loud as Gabriel,
and for a time that seemed eternity
I watched that vehicle in parallel
relationship to mine. But all things pass—
with time, acceleration, distance, mass.

In this physical world, all’s well that ends well. As for poetic technicalities, I just wanted to write a sonnet, didn’t know just what, and so let the rhymes clear the way for me.