For Dave Smith
No one this far south chances ice.
So what was I to think when I sat down for breakfast
on the morning after Christmas
and saw through our glazed kitchen window
the whole pond frozen white,
and out of the stiff green pines on the far side
of the pond, our neighbor’s teenage daughter
edging down the bank
one careful step at a time, a boot on a rock,
a boot on a ledge? She stopped at the lip of the ice,
picked up a rock large as a brick
and threw it out, watched it chip the surface
and slide. Then holding to a pine branch,
put one foot out and tried her weight.
I ran slow as a glacier,
or seemed to, as I pushed from the table,
and when she let go and shuffled away
from the bank, what could I do
but stand on my deck and shout the warning
that froze in the breath between us?
In the middle of the pond, all around her water
turned into something strange,
she began, of all things,
to shift on one leg, then the other,
each step sure as a prophecy,
each foot kicking thunder into the heads
of fish. Then up on her toes,
one leg sweeping her into a spin, arms flung out,
mittens like a blue dream circling her head.
And when she heard me and spun to a dizzy stop,
saw me in my ragged underwear,
barefoot on my deck,
when her hands came down to lift the hem
of an imaginary skirt
and she curtsied and turned and walked away,
I remembered a story her father told of growing up
poor in small town Ohio,
how every year in the hard of winter
the mayor drove a rattletrap onto the river
and the lottery began.
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