Seed Across Snow

Promise

40 Promise You leave. drive away. around the curve, a half-mile from here, your convertible slips under the star-lit canopy of sycamore leaves. white bones march alongside the creek by the road: take their warning. Underneath it is dark, yet lighted birds swoop as if in an aviary. Underneath is a house where a woman lives: you don’t know she likes to sleep with the windows open at night to listen for your car. You don’t know because you haven’t yet spent the night with her or you don’t know because you never thought to ask. now the cicadas cry, cut louder. sinister bird song falls from the trees. It is possible for you to drive through and come out the other side where the pasture waits—open for miles, long grass soft as my hair in your hands. It is. ...