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)
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