Cold Snap

We woke this morning to the silent menace of
minus seven degrees Fahrenheit.

The car started reluctantly,
it took two tries, like maybe it was headed for the light
and it was almost too painful to wake up to this
frigid life.

But it did, and it whisked us determinedly
toward our destination, my daughter in a fake fur hat
with animal ears and me in a fleece-lined lumberjack shirt
under my jacket - tame wild things,
helpless really, in the heated car
whose mechanics today ran true
delivering us to school and work respectively
while three crows huddled on the unbelievably
white snow's frozen crust saying something like,
can you believe this shit?