With moorlike beauty the moon
that served in the autumn as a lamp
reappears and seems the one living
deserving thing already above
the horizon for much of the night.
The year is complete: each season has set
its sharp stamp on the land.
And after the easiest winter of the war
some of us who overlapped for six years
are born into that sanctuary, the lean spring.
The floor of last year’s ragged tent
is carpeted with reindeer moss and cranberry
blossoms, as if a heart, on whose shoulder
my tent was placed, had burst through
its sleeping skin, from the weight of the snow dome.
Snow-beaten, the snow floor of the double igloo
feels like rice. No scab of ice
forms on our weather-ravaged faces
as dawn greys the burning dry-ice window.
Snow falls thinly, and I can imagine them
crossing the empty white sea
in other winters, the long frosted feathers
worked into their rain clothing
like Egyptian eyes on a dress
always frozen in its vision.
His hand always warmer than my own,
his broad, peaceful arms bringing
two miracles into being at once,
with one knee pulled upward he anchors
his sled with a flourish and birdlike amen.
His name-soul has cried herself
completely dry, and offers her half-moon breast
for a flat-tongued kiss, which touches them
into words, a voiceless L.
The consonant is drawn out tenderly
as snow snakes and patches their fireplace
of three stones, which makes
the soot-greyed icicled walls in which
they stand a fictive chapel,
awkward, urgent as a photograph,
while the ground-wind dies
painlessly, under the shallow snow.