Why My Bones Hate the Ice

This is why my bones hate the ice:

Ten years ago I stumbled across that white mirror

and snapped my foot off.

I could hear the ankle in my boot

crunching like a mouthful of ice.

I rolled through traffic to the curb,

and the cars stopped, their drivers afraid

to crush a fender on the Bigfoot

flushed from hiding in the woods.

Later, my bones spoke to me

through morphine, the great translator:

 

That could have been your head,

another Mexican sugar skull

on the Day of the Dead

with your name scripted in red letters.

You are nothing but a Neanderthal

and this is the new Ice Age.

Your bones will stack up

with all the other bones

below the ice of ten thousand years.

Your foot is mummified, wrapped

for the voyage to the next world,

and your ancestors are waving their hats at you

from the shore in a country where ice does not exist,

calling to you the way your grandfather did:

Ven aca. Come here.

 

Now I need my cane to walk a trail in the woods.

The brook is frozen, braiding the light at noon,

and the black water pulses through cracks in white,

where the ice is a lost civilization of fountains and catacombs,

the fangs of saber-toothed tigers, a coral reef of glass.

That’s why my bones love the ice.