Some Nights the Entire Gravel Driveway by Alice White

Some Nights the Entire Gravel Driveway
Alice White

is covered with fat orange slugs. Or frogs.
Or snails. You can’t run to the car barefoot
for something left there. You can’t step outside
to see the Milky Way splashed on the sky
without a flashlight. You have to look down
in the country. In the dark, you can slice
your foot open shattering a snail’s shell
like my toddler daughter did. Forget all
squeamishness: worse things than stalked eyes and slime
are smeared across the night, waiting for you.
It’s easy to kill without meaning to,
as easy as it is to die—always—
wherever you are—in the dark, a car,
the light— easy as the turn of a wheel—

MARGINALIA

1.
How fragile a body is—how easily it breaks, how quickly a moment shifts from ordinary to irreversible. You think you’ll have time. You think you’ll see it coming. But then something soft underfoot arrives in your life and suddenly you are undone.

2.
The danger feels most honest on the ground. I trust what’s beneath my feet. For example: the tectonic shift of grief. For example: the gravel that is my life.

3.
Would that I could describe to you how the world is constantly colliding with itself.

4.
I think of my own body, and the bodies I love, and how I’ve learned to scan tomorrow before I move, as if vigilance could undo the randomness of loss. As if watching closely could keep us safe. As if intention ever mattered more than chance.

5.
To be alive is to be capable of harm and still want to reach for gentleness. To walk through the dark anyway. To learn how to carry a flashlight, and still remember to look down.