Cold Poem

Cold now. Close to the edge. Almost unbearable. Clouds bunch up and boil down from the north of the white bear. This tree-splitting morning I dream of his fat tracks, the lifesaving suet. I think of summer with its luminous fruit, blossoms rounding to berries, leaves, handfuls of grain. Maybe what cold is, is the time we measure the love we have always had, secretly, for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe that is what it means the beauty of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals. In the season of snow, in the immeasurable cold, we grow cruel but honest; we keep ourselves alive, if we can, taking one after another the necessary bodies of others, the many crushed red flowers.