The day we roared with infinite jest the
larder packed tight with provisions burst.
So much canned meats, tinned, pemmican
hardtack we had stored knowing our
journey north would be sufficiently trying
that sustenance would prove difficult.
The slog. The slacking day when you rolled
off the sled, creviced. Your voice booming blue
crystalline as we see, no escape. Trapped and
the cans I hurl into the hole.
Hours I read to you lipped, curled into a
snail, a shell, a crocus of yellow
a dread of
finishing the story and saying to you there is
no
more. So you cannot tell, when the pages have ended
I make up confabulate truth and fiction
embellish.
Pretend the story line marches
forward decades and we are in the Amazon;
You’ve discovered
that the water
that seemed
guileless is crocodile filled.
They bite hard and
you can imagine.
All primary colors on the
floes, all glacial movement, slow to melt, fast to burn through
the colors of our arctic rainbow.
I had primed the lamp the last night, before that dawn, before
the ride in which you fell.
The wick trimmed and each
consequential action of the day I placed
hanks of hair
neatly side by side into banks of snow.
Under my cracked tongue is
a bump that rolls
mole like cyst.
Partner of my travels to this cold realm, your self shelved.
Below: Did you hear me whisper? Asking why today
have I become.
The whispered promise of holding
upright against the dark. I thought.
It would be magnificent.
Not even fanfare. Or aurora borealis. Or flight.
Yes dreams of flying.
Yes dreams of ahah so it is after all.
I thought I would recognize the moment of unleashing.
What makes the special now?
If I whisper Abandon I might hear you echo in the ice. I might see your
boot, attached to. A glove alone, unpaired.
The story they lived, the story they tell is one of each husky,
one by one, no longer. Starvation and then there are none.
But we are in the Amazon, and it is a scorching hot day and there is
much to be explored until you fall into the river and get bit.
I take it all back.
You laugh because I add flying monkeys which is
us pretending that we’ve explored
this terrain which looks like a bed
in a room and a chart.
They cannot
stop your bleed, and so we begin again.
Abrupt loss.
