convergence.

tell me about the cold, i say.

you cannot fathom the sounds; or the vast, blue distances that compose her working memory.

she speaks to me in sea water, in blue solitude and salinity. she speaks only in color, or in temperature, or in speed. without words.

tell me about the sounds, i say.

it is a decent medium to categorize, and divide. a clear encapsulation, perfect for all that is wicked, or excessive: a life lived thus far in this way: she expands, and thaws, and expands again. the resilience of ice-old adversity to fear. it was a waterless erosion: instead, she is polished smooth in places by three decades of lies, and a life of ablation, where glacial loss is greater than gain.

but i know better now, she tells me, without words. she speaks the fluidity between transparent and opaque. she knows the wrenching creak of entire miles of restless frozen water, and the distinctly quiet crack of a breaking heart.

i have only heard one of these things, in this life, but i imagine the sounds to be the same. i imagine that the impossibility of sustaining is what is so safe about ice.

tell me about your love, i say.

of some things, we are sure: that each day begins sweetly, with her breath on my back; of the blurred colors of houses we pass, in the car, and the heat of (our) fusion.

all earthly ice is hexagonal, she tells me or maybe i read it, hungry for scientific proof that her ever-expansive six-sidedness is not some floating, frozen dream.

(2014)