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the standard old fashioned is made with brandy & wolves emerge in the night.

here, the winter frost spreads just before April's dawn.  

April Third, what's left of my belongings scattered in the garage.

Lugging a suitcase and a bag of books into the back of the new, white Honda (since dinged & banged & eventually vanished from a parking spot on south 10th Street in Philadelphia.)  I digress...

Weather reported bands of snow along I-80 & the air, chilled, windy hung low & dense, smothered by the veil of gray, looming clouds.  It was an 18 hour drive to Allentown, where Gloria lay, tubes & fluids & sunken cheeks, where she lay in the living room, the very spot where the breath would leave her body a handful of weeks later.  It was only 12 hours to Pittsburgh.  I only had to make it to Pittsburgh.  Then I could rest.

The snow began to fall lightly in Indiana as the sun dipped below the horizon behind me, whirring, whiteknuckled, a white bullet in the lightly falling snow.

Eastern Ohio brought thick, wet, slick precipitation, as night cast its velvet shadow.  12 hours turned to 14, 15 as the bullet slowed, the eyes squinted & straining to glimpse a light or the road, signs obliterated, cars akimbo in ditches alongside jackknifed tractor trailers, eyes straining & squinting for Gloria, Gloria & the white.  

yr cheek's been turned  |  so've the tides