Hills of ice outside the indoor rink. I climb them, looking for your photograph. In the barkskin patterns of ice, soiled layers of sand, the rock-frozen display, I place my felt-thick feet, heavy-booted. The light from the ice centre's lamps thows a tungsten glow on the frozen rivulets and packed densities.
My dog runs over the mounds, compacted ice crystals, our breath steaming. I dig my head deeper into my upturned collar, the wind sub-zero, seeing you on the underside of the dark sky.
I am wearing deerskin gloves and merino wool tights and snowpants and a tight jacket pulled up high. Two layers of fleece insulate me underneath.
The frigid air catches my nostrils as I walk, white plume of breath, my thoughts composing the rigid ice hills where your image lies, fragile, fractals of millions of snowflakes, in crystalline rock.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Love this imagery and the visceral details. They remind me of all the times I'd bundled up in Boston. The title makes me think of Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening."
ReplyDeleteI've read this several times, wondering who the You is. In a way, it doesn't matter. In another way, it might make it more interesting if it were clearer.
ReplyDeleteIt makes me wish for Spring for you.
e_journeys, thanks, it was a very cold night!
ReplyDeletemb, I had some thoughts on the "you" in my work up for about a night, and deleted it thinking it of no relevance.
I am a lyrical poet. It's always the I/Thou relationship. The "you" is actually an indefinite pronoun, the way I use it. It could be someone in my present life, from memory, a composite remembering, part of myself, my muse or the divine.
I'm reading Jane Urquhart's, A Map of Glass, which begins with a death by freezing, and an artist who is photographing an installation piece on a desolate island finds the body, which is one of the most terrible ways to die in my estimation, so that may be some inspiration behind it. Or I was walking over these man-made snow/ice mounds with my dog thinking I should take photographs and put them up on my blog, where I'm not posting enough visual images, meaning, then, that the "you" becomes "you" the reader. The photograph that was never taken remains there still but is embedded in the words of the poem for the reader.
Notions of identity are always of interest. I believe identity is constructed, created. The identity of the "you" being an interesting construction, to say the least...
You sure bring it out of me, mb!
That's what I thought.
ReplyDelete