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.
