They were more in love now
Than they had ever been before.
Lying in a small, yellow raft,
The sun lit them for 20 hours of the day.
Small fragments of floes drifted past;
With his pen-knife he carved
Ice flowers of them for her.
At night, the sky flushed ultramarine to match the water.
She would make a pillow of his shoulder
And they slept warm enough, blanketless.
They didn’t do much on their raft
Because there wasn’t much to do—
Around them, the sea was chill-blue
And they loved each mother more.
Months before, when they brought the cruise tickets,
It had been the clean aesthetic of the arctic
And the words ‘Secret Norway’ that won them over.
No, they didn’t want to uncover Norway’s secret;
They wanted to become a part of it, a final
“Great escape” into their dying years.
The cruise ship went under, they thought,
As if by choice into black-water oblivion.
A casual dive through the glassed-over surface.
A few inflated yellow rafts.
Of course, it was difficult for them, to look
On as that stranger’s blue hand stretched for their raft.
‘This is our great escape,’ they both were thinking.
Was it envy they felt when he let go?
It doesn’t matter. They, too, planned
To slip into that same murk at some point.
But for now, they would be in love.
He paddled them through the iceberg drifts and
They fell asleep at night, curled one next to the other,
To the measured sounds of melting glacial drip.