Acting In A Swedish Film by William Doreski

The four corners of the wind

square off against each other.

Blowing snow obliterates

the view we accepted years ago

when the landscape writhed with ice

and a few pines nodded and snapped.

That view contained houses, steeples,

and a couple of dormant factories.

The wind has rethought that view,

and when it emerges from the mist

we’ll be acting in a Swedish film

with a suicide sprawled in a drift.

The blocky, old-fashioned wind

bluffs through gray improbables

to brace us against each other

whether we’re comfortable or not.

We’ll phone the police to collect

the body, but they won’t want it.

Someone from the hospital

will pick it up in a pickup truck

and tote it to the morgue where

it will sit up and call us by name.

But the film will have progressed

and the plot wholly unraveled.

We were never the stars of it

but played bit parts including

varied manifestations of wind

that displayed the most human traits,

each scene ending with a sob.