I.
It's cold enough to kill
out here on the frozen waters,
where the frost creeps in
to everything,
where the winter wind
will break you.
Bent double under it's weight
Naked, stripped of life,
on this cataract of ice,
this fog on the eye
under the frozen sky.
It cuts to the heart,
icicle daggers in our hands
or crushed in our mouths.
Their bones turning to powder,
the powder to cool water.
The blizzards cry, a howl,
to wake us from death.
Death is what we are.
Trapped in creeping veins
of cold wonder.
Time gets lost underneath
the snow laden boughs
of the evergreen trees.
This wasteland of white
paper, a reflected sky.
The clouds above us piled high.
We wait for the thunderous fall.
A tidal wave of white
descends to drown us all.
II.
Summer with my second cousin,
catching fish off the docks,
stickleback and perch,
their spines drawing blood,
all strung out on a chain held between us.
In winter we struck out on snow shoes
Trekked up the mouth of a frozen stream
to find a beaver dam,
wolf tracks in the snow
and a half frozen waterfall,
The whole world held
in that captive moment
a filigree of frost on every twig and reed.
Freeze dried dinners,
cooked over a Calor gas stove
on a tiny island, lost
in the middle of
some nameless lake,
which we shared with the birds and the sky.
We battered our frozen hands raw
running a toboggan down the hillside
and shooting out across the frozen lake,
screaming with excitement
until our momentum
could take us no further.
III.
He should have been Ahab,
that storm washed captain
born to the sea, he was
some mad gunner, screaming
“FIRE ONE!”
as we loaded hairspray charges,
and our soft fruit shells
rained down on the tree line
Plastic drainpipe, aerosol,
a match, and a potato
in his hands became a cannon
We were soldiers in thrall
to his battle cries
Nemo, riding the waters,
his Nautilus an old tool shed
on runners, dragged across
the frozen lake
His wooden house lost
in the wild North lands,
we could only go deeper,
find him, like Kurtz,
at the end of the river
He taught me to kill,
to tear life from the waters
The darkness was learning
how a deer is dismembered
How meat peels from bone
and fish eyes burst like grapes
between our fingers
He will always be magnificent
The city will not claim him
He will sink into the earth,
into tree sap syrup, and worms
to dangle on my fishing hook