Creek Running North

I could live an entire lifetime in Iowa,
huffing steamy breaths into my cupped cold hands,
warming the truck to fetch my wife from her job in town.
When we met in high school, her hair was long and straight
she was nearly swallowed up behind the wheel of her parents’ Galaxie 500.
We went to the river once, I would remember sometimes,
and watched ice blocks roll past as tulip poplar buds swelled.

Her father would do this not entirely serious thing
giving me hell for listening to Iowa Public Radio
out of Cedar Falls.
Her mother would buy me shirts
I would have to wear to breakfast Saturday mornings in Waterloo.

I would fill their tank and pay for it,
plow their driveway on my way to work.

Watching my wife read the Sunday Courier at the kitchen table,
I would reach over to snap the cuff of her quilted thermal undershirt.

She would be Norwegian or something
but her hair, black in bangs above dark eyes
would curl just below her earlobes, and she would ask
if I had fed the dogs.