Tonight I skate on adult ankles across the blue pond
sifted with snow, back and forth across ice lit
as if from underneath by moonlight and many stars.
As I sweep and turn, the wind warms itself
inside my collar and rings the cattle’s crystal bells
where they huddle over ranging fields. Starlight,
she whispers, bright stars, though the tiny
woman I have always loved can’t see them.
What is it like to drift between your life and your life?
Needles dot her arms, nurses rub their cotton cloths
like clouds across her face. Like melting ice
the fluids drop down trickling to their tubes.
When I take her hand, and off we go, our skates slice
lightly in the rippled ice, her hair blown-frost
and tangled. She tugs my arm and sings I wish.
Brittle tree limbs crackle in sudden gusts
and so she leaves me, skating ahead with surprising grace,
called to by something else. Once I watched her
pile of precious scraps become a quilt.
Once she pulled it to my chin and in my first sickness
I kicked it off. The fragile ice, blue-floured ice
we cut across, groans and gives, grows weaker.
Each time we pass in time. Once she wept when
her child’s children, sullen in their hand-me-downs,
scuffed early home from school and wouldn’t speak.
In this grown place, across blue sheets, we swing
until my ankles tire and ache. Who can finally reach her
where she whips beneath the trees? She pirouettes and floats,
she spins alone in spray, her body lifting luminous and whole
like song, now like a prayer. So this is what we are.
On she glides when I have stopped. On she sails when I have
laid me down and under starlight closed my eyes.
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