Gary Leising
Gary Leising is the author of the book, The Alp at the End of My Street, from Brick Road Poetry Press (2014). He has also published three poetry chapbooks: The Girl with the JAKE Tattoo (Two of Cups Press, 2015), Temple of Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House, 2010) He lives in Clinton, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he teaches creative writing and poetry as a professor of English.
Driving to Work after an Early Spring Snow
A sun spray reflection
radiates death off the whiteness
of everything. Two neat rows
like planted furrows,
tire tracks of the person
who left my side street before me.
Early riser, what called you past
the farm field crows
culling the dirt for seed or scraps
of pale green weed tricked
to scrabble through topsoil
and die in the cold winter’s black beak?
Why are any of us out here
with the daylight saving sun
instead of sheeted still in bed,
our vision hidden in shut lids.
In houses we might hope to be not
alone,
but we always are at this hour.
How I envy those few deer
milling in the shadeline of some trees,
a stretch where boughs blocked
snow and so they find spring’s offerings,
first foods to fatten
them for fawning. Those trees
providing a kindness
as great as people should
aspire to give each other.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 