Driving to work the old Ram’s heater  
just beginning to warm his booted feet 
as he winds past the Revolutionary War-era farmhouses 
of Pelham Island Road  
through winter-emptied swamplands 
and snow-covered woods 
he sees the trees opening ahead  
along the edges of Heard’s Pond.   

Bright sun flashing across ice and snow  
makes him slow and steer into a dirt path. 
Finding the old hockey skates in his trunk  
and leaving brown-leaved trees behind him 
he walks down the frozen rocky path  
across tamped-down snow—frozen and refrozen for days—  
and onto a shoveled square of ice. 

Hockey sticks and children’s sleds are mere ghosts this early 
as he sits in a snow bank  
with his winter coat beneath him 
and laces his old skates slowly 
fingers cold in the morning air. 
Standing tentatively 
he pushes and slides smoothly across the hard ice 
turns and crosses over like his younger self 
skates around the square in circles 
and follows a thin path and figure-eight trail  
shoveled days before by neighborhood children  
their chases and laughter etched now in the ice.  

In a few moments  
he will sit to unlace with fingers awkward from cold 
and just as he was taught as a young child 
scrape snow and ice from the blades 
then carefully wipe them dry.    

But now 
squinting across the frozen pond 
and into the blue sky 
he thinks 
this is the right way to begin  
what might be 
the last morning of his life. 

Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating a visiting writers series. His poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Sand Hills, The Blue Mountain Review, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Rest of the Way, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.