No Matter the Weather

Ice claims everything in sight and burns,
returning to us light shed by rooms
we had gathered in to drink and discuss
what we can and cannot get away with.
Wood burns to warm the rooms. Once in them
we were left without words for what makes us
who we are: the way we touch when we are
breathing just right, the way your back’s expanse
moves me when you turn away after love.
Like the patient movement of landscape
as it comes down white to frozen water:
a river, and under ice the current.
Things continue no matter the weather.
We have followed our hearts to the river
and can hear the laughter of our guests
from where we stand on ice and discuss
what lies in the distance. It’s safe.
We tell ourselves it must be, looking
at tracks clear in the dusting of snow,
thinking of the first to cross after the storm.
How far the other side must have been:
as far as anything we desire,
as far as the distance between us
formed of the cold sum of our arguments.

After we cross back over the expanse
of pale cold that could carry away
our weighted lives, our guests go home.
We laugh, as we gather up glasses,
at the risk we wouldn’t have mentioned
while the current went by beneath us.
Outside our breath would rise, some signal
of relief. Later, asleep, your pale
beautiful back faces the window.
Even awake you would not see the snow
or the ice gone dark around our home.
I think of how we left our own party
to walk through a world assuming forms
the cold demands. We made it safe across
the river, where even at this hour
someone too poor to own a shanty
has made his hole in ice and fishes,
his line drifting in a gray-soaked world
where things live and die without need
of his imagination. Deep enough,
the cold remains a distant rumor.