Here you will find the Poem Iowa & Other Accidents of poet Kate Northrop
There was snow that afternoon covering the road which twisted toward the secret of water, the mysterious surge of sludge & loam, the living Mississippi, unlike the rest of the Midwest, drawing itself through landscape. There was an appointment you were keeping in Moline: a cheap hotel, booze, a little blow. On the Lower East Side, a woman spills her martini, makes a gesture like erasure, or regret. It was almost Christmas. In the rear view suddenly, the car you will always describe as oncoming must have slipped into a skid and now, rising up over the bank, it startles you—that reflection. In Moline the maid corners the bed, straightens the clean line of sheet. Almost Christmas. On the road, swirls of snow. On the road the car hovering behind you, a witness, unfortunate & so unlike the audience permitted the distance of fictions, the artifice of plot. And worse, of course, the law of cause & effect: I looked up, it started to fall. You must attach subject to verb, must say I saw, and did, in your rear view, the car you?d thought nothing of, the gray sedan lifting slowly from the common snow, turning, and the accident always there, about to happen.