i. Ice Kate
I don’t mind cold — but your language positively frost-bites. From the vantage point of my island-table at Caffé Habitū, I watch you over coffee work out in the rink opposite, shaving — with the steel blades in your boots — crisscross scars in the dumb blue-freeze. Later, when you join me, exalted and re-dressed in shades of executive blizzard, it’s the blade of your tongue you share, chatterboxing my criminal lack of cut-throat chill, my laughably lukewarm hopes. It’s only in the aftermath — you having punctually departed for the next inhuman Everest — that your clinical gift of bruises comes slowly to my senses through the thaw, and I am returned so much tenderer to the world,
this world you don’t know.
ii. Snowtalk
I barely know snow first-hand.
I saw it once in hills, punched with foot-prints;
kids slid on it on an old car-door,
sopping wet. There was no sign then
of its pristine symbol. I taught a Chinese student
whose name meant “Reliant on Snow” and another
in the same class called “Ice Cold” — they were both women,
both wedded to snow and its human meanings
on their birthdays, long before they had any idea
what they meant. . . .
In a second-hand Stockholm,
I find the dirty city snow dispiriting —
all that it could evoke is so far from realized —
I am burnt with its yearning but not healed,
walking in circles over other people’s footsteps
impurely.
iii. Male Model in a Picture
Dressed in evergreen black, he duly outstands
Winter to the left of some European forest
clutching a brief case, as if in fact
he were on his way to a board-meeting of snowmen.
His tie must be stiff as a board. Ice-crystals form
between the long leather fingers of his gloves.
He cannot smile — his rugged,
pine-needle beard would only stab him if he tried
and he knows that blood (at best) in this world
can attract only business-like scorn. His mind
must be fourteen, fifteen degrees below by now,
but his thought never chatters. Come,
he invites, to my easy two dimensions,
to my hand-made, male cold. Come.
Chinaman Creek 