"High Plains" by Kate Northrop

                     

  HIGH PLAINS

                                     (overnight, at 40 below)

The town drawn in and quiet, as the inside

Of a closet.  Impenetrable, as a dream

But still the interstate slides by

The semis rising from the east,

Outlined in lights, all lighted up!

And dropping into the valley again

Goodbye: they drop

Easily as coins through a broken soda machine

(easily as snow-crust struck by sun: someone I loved once

Opening the curtain and flushed, I remember in the mirror,

Mint-bright, fuck-stunned)

And they drop away from us, from our houses

Facing the prairie

Which we see tonight
As if on the brink: still, moon-white.

-Kate Northrop

 the poem first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2012
Northrop's last book was Clean