broken

off from ship’s grasp held tight in icy fiords, whose walls are calving and crying like

orphans.

I have arrived as a beached whale upon the summer’s shore, an upended puzzle of

floes.

The gulls and shrikes careen overhead, jaegers dive bomb my limp hair in warning or

desire

for its twisted strands, fodder for their ground-borne nests camouflaged in a riot of

pointillism

matted together as one, terra incognito, I must come to know. Permafrost carpet,

shawl

of my soul, warped by arctic hours, the speed demon—light—in this latitude, pressing

flower

to seed, seed to soil, and all creatures foraging furiously before hibernation, migration or

death.

Height of summer, elliptical curve of northern sky never fully darkens. I dream aurora

borealis,

its green curtain falling in waves, like you, that last time, back-lit at dusk, and I hear

shooting

stars, read their outlines like a new alphabet or points of Braille I can not see but almost

touch.

Desiccated, my southern soul feeds upon open space but distances deceive. Fata Morgana

rises

shimmering over seas, another land beckons, assassinates my exhausted mind,

imagination

flummoxed, everything appears mysterious, abysmal, sealed. It is the unfading light

bent

by cold air that haunts, it is what disappears and what remains, the soon to be

frozen

tundra sponge, dense and mournful running ribbon-like through my shoes, water

squeezed

from my unfooted sock, borne high on willows, bough bound to bough, a flag of

surrender.