Treacherous Driving, by Marjorie Maddox

Snow Heart, composite photograph, Karen Elias (USA). Contemporary.

                                

Treacherous Driving
        
​"It's as safe as traveling to work..."
                      -a cardiologist before performing a transplant

The first night of the blizzard
that stranger inched into Ohio.
Halfway through he skidded
into our snow-spackled lives.
His heart is buried
in my father,
who is buried.

This is the hole
in the stranger, in my father,
in my own cracked
chest, hail cupped in its cavity,
the aorta beginning to freeze.                        

All winter,
the weather preaches white
lies: fields blank of roads,
a curve straightened,
the even light of sky.

Tonight the breeze is all
icicles, banner-like
from the clouds. Nothing
is moveable
in this treacherous state.

Our wheels spin,
their rhythm: a breath
that pulls us
then stalls. The law

of the body, of the state,
cannot replace the chain
reaction, jackknifed lives,
hope piling into hope.

The man and his heart,
cold on an icy road,
warmed us for weeks
while winter, a clear blue thing,
wafted light.

Marjorie Maddox

Artist, activist, and retired Pennsylvania College of Technology professor Karen Elias created the composite photograph Snow Heart in response to Marjorie Maddox's poem "Treacherous Driving." Both poem and photograph were displayed in the Visual Words and Speaking Art Exhibit (The Station Gallery; Lock Haven, PA, November 9—23, 2018.) The poem appears in Maddox's re-released collection Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf & Stock, 2018), which chronicles her father's unsuccessful heart transplant during the Blizzard of ’93. The book won the Yellowglen prize and was one of three finalists for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak book awards. Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, and several children's books. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com



​