Saturday Poem

Passing

Fat Russian novels are sinking
like grandmothers into the snow,
and a troika is whisking through my sleeves
as if time were muffled
in the folds of my overcoat

The harness creaks.
The horses snort
small jets of breath into my stormy coat,
and somehow I am flying backwards
over the salted landscape.
Suddenly my grandmother passes by —
on a lounge chair, in bathing suit and sunglasses.
She is flying forward, to Florida.


—Stephen Frank,