The thought that you could even save the light,
that you could stop it from having to be
everywhere at once.
You stood in the ice cream shop
and from the street, in a group
of silly glass trumpets
light came,
and broke into millions of itself, shattered
from the pressure of being mute who knows how long.
There also, leaning against the counter
the child who saw nothing
but the bins of sweet color
separately rimmed with silver.
Behind you, thoughtfully placed by the owners, a photo
of an avalanche, its violence
locked in blue spears . . . The ice moved cruelly, one way only,
and behind the avalanche, and behind
the posts that held it,
the cars went back and forth like mediators.
You who do not exist:
you stared along the edges of the freezer:
frost glistened and clustered.
Suddenly it looked as if one act could be completed,
mounting over and over, even under terrible pressure.
Perhaps the tiny crystals would last forever.
Once it seemed the function of poetry
was to redeem our lives.
But it was not. It was to become
indistinguishable from them.