Sister in the snow, I took another family
and you did not, I took two children out of my knee.
Your brother has fallen down to be cold again—
on his palm he offers two small figures to the white
storm
I couldn’t get away, I took another childhood,
I broke my promise not to go back, and it’s cold.
I broke my promise not to suffer, and now
I have to start all over again to earn my solitude
Your mistake is elegant, mine is clumsy,
my scarf is wet and I can’t think about myself.
Please be proud of your crystal, your well-made crystal
which does not leak and where you don’t shiver
You can be no one and I must be my father,
haunting another childhood with my panic,
and I was meant to be frozen beside you, frozen
upright
above the goldfish in the solid silver waterfall
and I have to forget what I hate, I have already
begun to forget, it is not hatred anymore, it is
the old childhood, my father’s heart attack,
and long instructions about my buttons and my shoes
I left my lover to sit at the head of the table.
My wife has to wonder where I’ve been
and I have to explain that she was wrong, I was
never strong, I was merely frozen with my sunlight in
the ice
Now you are alone, you are truly alone,
you were the one who remained standing,
and I betrayed the ending, I fell down under the big
snowflakes
just like my father, just like his father
and I don’t care about anyone again, they can all
go to hell, it is the only luxury down here
where everything changes into nothing new, and you
wait to be cut down in revenge by your duplicate
What unfreezes a man? By whose authority does he admit the Gulf Stream into his crystal? How does the humiliated spirit find its way out of the dead Kabala? How to smear the ideal with possibility and then humble every possibility? Why is nothing left standing? What removes the skill from his caress and leaves his hand amputated from all meaning, lifeless and heavy on her thigh? Why is he born again without a monument? Either you know why you have come into this world or you don’t.