Ryan Quinn Flanagan

BUILDING A SNOW WALL

My father taught me how to shovel a driveway.
Just as his father taught him before.

How to build a snow wall from the start of winter
and carry it through the season.

First, simply shovelling those lighter early snows
to the side, then those heavier packing snows
acting as bonding layers.

The heavy stuff torn up from the end of the drive
after the plow has been by and stacked across the entire line
of the snowbank.

Then the lighter snow piled on top,
packed down with the back of your shovel.

And again, with the next wet
packing snow day.

By early January,
the deep cold has set in
and frozen everything to a solid
snow wall.

If you have done it right,
it will be taller than a person.

I still remember the day my father handed me
the big shovel, sent me down to the end of the drive
to deal with the heavy stuff.

He didn’t say anything, just sent me on my way.
And I was proud, as if entering
manhood finally.

All these years later, it is simple muscle memory now.
Building a new wall of snow
each season.

IT NEVER FAILS

As soon as you have finished shovelling,
the snowplow comes by.

Tears up all the ice and heavy stuff
and piles it all in the end of your driveway.

It often knocks over the neighbour’s snowbank
and caves it into your drive.

Everyone hates the plow up in these parts.
You start giving the side-eye to the end of the road
once you are two-thirds done with shovelling.

Half-expecting the plow to be sitting there,
waiting sadistically for you to finish.

Ever since I was a child,
the plow has always been there like some
despised villain of The Great
White North.

No one seems to know who drives the plow,
and that is probably a good thing.

They know he works for the city.
Making things harder, when that’s the last thing
anyone needs.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, Setu, River Dog, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.