I look outside
on a frigid night
at a jagged landscape

clinging to the running boards 
of SUVs and trucks,
my own station wagon,

the old car in front of
the triple decker across the street.
Clods of snow and petrified ice,

inverted Arctic territories
waiting for a thaw to get back
to where they came from

before we smashed through the mess
on the road, splashed them up
and brought them here.

By spring, maybe nothing
on the roadside will be local.
It will be a refugee mess

like all of us who have come here
by chance, ended up here
or displaced from somewhere else.