When He asks, quietly, if I still think of You

even when I’m here, 
I say
"always."

why?
because snow falls just as softly here as it
did
during our first kiss,
when it melted on your flushed
cheeks
in the mountain light of our childhood. 


I think of your face as it was,
like the neighbor’s cornfield,
fogged but bright through the windows of your car 

as you raced me home in the pastoral dawn

to beat my parents' alarm clock.

now when I look at you,

I see the ruins of the storm:
the once-grand Victorians of our town, 
sunken and foul, 

the spray painted x’s, signaling “condemned,”

barely masked by the slush.
this new color in the landscape of your countenance,
is 
a translucent grey
—
I think it is called indifference.

They told us
“distance extinguishes small flames,
and fuels great fires.”

my breath burns cold and sharp, 

like the icicles that hung outside your mother’s store, 

when You told me that it was easy to hurt me,

and You didn’t know why.

those words froze me solid
like citrus trees killed in a late frost.


He says that He still see the pinkness in my own cheeks,
 when I talk of You.
I sigh
and say that I will try harder 

to stop loving You,

but 
the chairlift rocks and shifts the spears in my chest and
I wince,

because I know I will for all my life.