Black Ice
Katherine Hoerth
March 20, 2022
February 24, 2022
How easily we slip into despair
on the black ice of the heart. This highway,
with its glazed turns, stretches
through the endless plains of Oklahoma.
I’m heading south. I’m driving home. I listen
to the radio—a world away,
a war is born in Ukraine. Tanks plow over
frozen roads. I fix my eyes ahead:
there’s miles and miles and miles and miles of wreckage—
the sun is up and glimmering, unveiling
last night’s tragedies of mangled steel
and shattered glass. The morning sky is now
the color of the aftermath of bombs.
Ahead of me, an ambulance drives slowly.
We’re all inching forward now. My foot
hovers above the brakes, although it’s futile.
The car still slips and slides. The ambulance
slips too. I wonder who’s inside, who’s brave
enough to rescue one of countless victims
of this ice storm. Every mile or two,
I see another toppled car, a jackknifed truck.
At first, I count each one, and then I stop—
too many for the weary mind to fathom.
That could be me: the ditch, the ice, the crossfire.
The news says that the Russians kept on shelling
Kyiv into the early morning hours.
There’s nothing I can do to stop it, no.
A windmill’s turbines wave. I feel a gust
shove my car. I wince. My knuckles turn
the hue of snow. Ahead, the ambulance
begins its slow careen. It’s happening—
the horrifying choreography
of calamity. It lurches left,
then swings back to the right. It turns and turns
like the earth, my stomach, and the tires
with nothing left to grip but gloss. It slips
onto the shoulder then the median.
I watch it through my window as it topples,
rolls like a snowball, like an avalanche,
a war out of control, until it stops,
as still as death. An eerie silence fills
the frozen psyche and the morning air.
Suddenly it’s in my rearview mirror.
What else can I do but keep on going?
If I hit the brakes and stop, the ice
will take me, too—and so I watch it grow
smaller in the distance, praying someone
else will interfere, that good will triumph
like it always has, or so I let
myself believe. I’m praying for the driver,
for the passenger, and for Ukraine,
for light, for this freak storm to end, for peace.
Deep inside, I shatter like the windshield.
Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022). In 2015, she won the Helen C. Smith Award for the best book of poetry. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.
