Photo by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash
Driving to work the old Ram’s heater
just beginning to warm his booted feet
as he winds past the Revolutionary War-era farmhouses
of Pelham Island Road
through winter-emptied swamplands
and snow-covered woods
he sees the trees opening ahead
along the edges of Heard’s Pond.
Bright sun flashing across ice and snow
makes him slow and steer into a dirt path.
Finding the old hockey skates in his trunk
and leaving brown-leaved trees behind him
he walks down the frozen rocky path
across tamped-down snow—frozen and refrozen for days—
and onto a shoveled square of ice.
Hockey sticks and children’s sleds are mere ghosts this early
as he sits in a snow bank
with his winter coat beneath him
and laces his old skates slowly
fingers cold in the morning air.
Standing tentatively
he pushes and slides smoothly across the hard ice
turns and crosses over like his younger self
skates around the square in circles
and follows a thin path and figure-eight trail
shoveled days before by neighborhood children
their chases and laughter etched now in the ice.
In a few moments
he will sit to unlace with fingers awkward from cold
and just as he was taught as a young child
scrape snow and ice from the blades
then carefully wipe them dry.
But now
squinting across the frozen pond
and into the blue sky
he thinks
this is the right way to begin
what might be
the last morning of his life.
Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating a visiting writers series. His poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Sand Hills, The Blue Mountain Review, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Rest of the Way, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.