 |
|
|
|
|
 |
We knew a cataract of ice
across a cellar hidden in the woods,
and a girl's voice who broke and slipped it through,
cold water that filled her lungs and intestine,
the skin made winter.
You could always
see the dark lily-thing in the water then. The she.
Sometimes,
she saw you back; she had pale eyes.
The ice whispered, sticks broke,
each action was quiet and single. Privacy became
privation, then deprivation.
Each of us had our ponds
or made ponds of ourselves and
what was in them was gone.
We had our little bodies,
our lily-things,
whether wrapped up in lining of an old coat
or on some they-can-never-see-
-it papers.
Does any of it see us back
with the same oblique intelligence
as the eyes in the water?
I try to pinch the thought
of her through an ice-cataract.
But the memory is fragile,
a breath will vaporize the surface, and
what it holds
can freeze the living skin.
I
Andrew Aulino finished an MFA in 2008 and is currently living in (not to mention planning his escape from) Northeast Ohio.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|