Content Warning: allusions to death, violence, and self-harm

Thaw

Why I am here I no longer remember.

The wind heaves through the

thickness of winter. The deer and hare are gone, leaving          

only bones in their wake, gaping       

bare and luminous, white on

impenetrable white.

It is here you emerge, ice gusts oiling your body,

a slow unburial from the permafrost.

I run my fingers across your spine,         

feel for your heartbeat in the silence waiting         

at the threshold of my skin.

You are perfectly preserved,

exquisite, exact,

each wound shattered across your chest

a precision of light         

slicing a held note that stretches         

deep red across tundras of trackless bright,

a chorus in which I can hear each sleepless

night, each thimble of sweat, suspended,         

whispering in synchrony.

I think I would follow you        

through the drifts and hollows of quiet,          

until my breathing blurs and the wind

whips our blood to frost.

But you look so peaceful, lying there,           

that I do not dare           

take your hand in mine.

And then your flesh         

blackens and swells, sloughs into a din          

of wings, beaks, claws, a cawing

of omen and myth, scattering

one by one

into the darkening sky.

You are gone.

The lake’s ice glistens,         

a time-scratched mirror         

through which my face rises alone,         

indeterminate,

while around me snowflakes feather, each one          

slipping unconscious to Earth

and then vanishing        

like memory.