How vividly the memory of your lips
Struck me in that cave of ice
As if one of those stalactites,
Frozen in perpetual motion,
Had thawed just enough to crack and fall
Directly down.
It didn't need to fall though, it's fall was implicit
And as you held me there, pressing my back
To where the ice met the stone I realized
That's where we were, too-
Trapped in the ambiguity of permanence meeting
Utmost transience.
The waterfall melted around us
And each second we spent
In the starkly unstable cave hidden behind it
Was a risk then uncalculated.
With the eruption
Cascading in the quietest places of memory
We willed the thaw, really,
Begging 'let it drown us;
Let all the ice melt and let it
Pull us under and from to river
To our corpse floating through the ocean,
Let it pull
All away
From the stone.'
Feb 3, 2014
Feb 3, 2014 at 6:17 PM UTC
How vividly the memory of your lips
Struck me in that cave of ice
As if one of those stalactites,
Frozen in perpetual motion,
Had thawed just enough to crack and fall
Directly down.
It didn't need to fall though, it's fall was implicit
And as you held me there, pressing my back
To where the ice met the stone I realized
That's where we were, too-
Trapped in the ambiguity of permanence meeting
Utmost transience.
The waterfall melted around us
And each second we spent
In the starkly unstable cave hidden behind it
Was a risk then uncalculated.
With the eruption
Cascading in the quietest places of memory
We willed the thaw, really,
Begging 'let it drown us;
Let all the ice melt and let it
Pull us under and from to river
To our corpse floating through the ocean,
Let it pull
All away
From the stone.'
Request permission to use this poem