Prove

In turns, the sky that evening was worked nickel, 
brushed tin, then the color of a heron’s wing 
reflected in the waters she hunted.
In full dark, the snow began to fall again, 
and quietly in the distance, as if
to concede its thin claim on being, the city 
faded into night above the river.
We were told the world would be buried 
by morning and, thinking it better to be 
at your place, packed a box with booze 
and a battery-powered radio
and what we’d need to make a loaf of sourdough 
from scratch. It was a hobby of ours then;
I remember jars of starter like rows
of palely glowing lanterns in the fridge, 
how feeding them was so much like feeding
something living, you’d refuse, months later,
to scrape them down the sink. And how they knocked 
and rattled as we walked, single file,
the half mile along the edge of the road, 
passing the box back and forth between us, 
and turning now and then to the erasure 
the snow had made of our tracks behind— 
the empty highway, and disfigurements
of roadside poles in their poses of valediction.
We built a buzz with the wine, then hit the whiskey 
for good measure—stayed up half the night
while the loaf, heavy with flour, mixed 
and kneaded and folded, resisted
its proof on the cold countertop.
We shuffled cards and watched the flakes come




slantwise across the lambent eddies 
the streetlights cast in the alley, dealt
and talked and then must have slept a little, 
because waking, were stunned by finished snow. 
A landscape softened to line and contour, 
shadow and light. Nothing moving,
not a sound in the yard. And through our dreaming, 
the dough, overproofed and overspilling
the bowl, left us, what else, but to punch it down 
and score and bake a ruined thing—
let it harden and flatten in the oven,
split along its faults with markings like those 
incised in the clay tablets of Sumer,
the ones which began by naming our things, 
then, thinning to sounds, shaping our longings.

Read more from Issue 17.1.