It was the relentless forge in the stomach. The heat from inside.
The kind of heat that’s felt in wet snow and woods—
where the indoors are too warm, too ephemeral. Where you stay outside where the air is like ice—
where the lilacs have frozen over, where the dandelions sing, where leaves stay green, crystallized on the wind—
where the lonely hawk cries in the chalk-palette of midday,
and where the sky is dead, an illuminated disc over flat stone—
a shore of magma rocks black as bone, lit with a colder sort of sunlight—
the kind of sunlight which will never become summer.
In the cold, time stands still. And in it you must forever walk, never stand still—
because if you do not then you will be buried
by snow, by ice, by solitude. Adults know this—
“We’ll be out for one hour fifty minutes with lunch at 11:45,
and be back before dark.” They make their plans
where the snow cannot hear. Children, though, do not know this
— not yet —
so they speak of wanting to go outside, then when they do they cry
after twenty minutes, twenty hours, because they told the snow that they could be out forever—
a child’s promise of eternity made true, in the feywild of the snow.
Children in winter-prone places grow up inoculated by adults against the seductions of the snow
and when they no longer need to learn, they are adults.
But some people never learn. Mountaineers make their plans (where the snow cannot hear, of course)
but betray it all, after, to the snow: they whisper, cajole,
beg mercy and justice from the boredom of their lives—
they secretly want to be taken, you see. They want to disappear
into the void: the wake of silence, the snowing kind—
where not only light and sound
but thought and language and people and time
and aging, death, life are all forgotten. There is only the snow
and there is only marching up the mountain—
eternally climbing, never summiting, never finding summer.
Mountain climbers are like children. They tell the snow
their plans, their souls, everything. But they have no sense—
unlike children, they cannot cry, and there is nowhere to return home
and no town to call their own. And in exchange, the snow takes
—steals—
too many mountaineers away to the peaks each year
and they do not return.
Even without winter, there can be snow. It was there last night in my room. I opened my eyes and could not see
through the storm, the flurries, the flush, the slush of sky and ground
that blended into white on and below and above horizon—
and I was white, too: my coat was white and my gloves were too
and my scarf and my gaiters and my snowpants and boots .
I was swimming in blind bright space, an astronaut.
And I was cold, for I had just come from another dream—
one of a snowstorm at sea, the black chop below like knives
freezing, the breath from my lungs and the language from my tongue stolen
from the shock to my system, the absence of light and sound
as I dove under. And when I woke from that dream I swam through the sea
of snow with air between, a slurry of gale and crisp air unbreathable
(not so dissimilar from an avalanche, except an avalanche
freezes solid the moment it stops, just like time for all those mountaineers)
and I climbed my mountain, because here too I was a mountain climber, because aren’t we all
and so little time passed, and when I felt I had reached the summit I paused—
And then came the true form of snow. The numbness of fingers and toes
the slow deadening of ears and nose, the blueberry blue of lips
the stone ocean that was the air, the sea of immortal snow.
and I knew I didn’t matter. To summit meant nothing to the world
and soon my oxygen would run out, and I would join the snow as a stain
(dark, red, hot, glistening, beautiful)
until that, too, snowed over, and I would add a few inches to the body of the mountain peak—
and I did not want to move, for I knew that this was my fate.
I opened my mouth to cry, to topple, to share not only my mind but my soul with the snow
(I was a mountaineer, after all)
but then the gale gusted, my lungs filled with white and my blood spiked into snowflakes—
and hot blood bloomed from me like from a rose crushed in the hand
red dribbling into the sand, poetry written there cloaked by the tide
footprints abandoned there smeared by the otters, by the waves,
backpacks forgotten there buried by the snow, by the ice
photographs taken there unrecognizeable by the frozen-over footprints, by the naturalists’ signs
hopes and dreams planted there forgotten in the tyre tracks over snow and ice over salt water. Blood pooled in my lungs
and I, too, forgot —
forgot the way down the mountain, because time had stopped
and yes, I did not matter to the world, but the world did not exist
(because without time, there is no change,
and without change, there is no world)—
ergo, furiously: I was the only thing that mattered. And all I could do from there was to regain the forge under my skin—
to keep moving forward, up the mountain, because the peak I had found here was a lie
and with my new secret to sustain me, to never tell the snow my plans—
for how I would blaze, raze, boil the snow into steam
turn the grass green as spring limes
sear the sky blue again, steamclouds resting high
(spreadeagled under the sun despite the chill)
(despite the blinding white)—
how I would make a summer of my own,
because if summer will not come for me, then I will come for it
and how I would ignore the peak, wherever it may be—
always walk, never summit, return once in a while to town—
and how in this way, I would coax time to start again.
Time stops when you start to measure it.