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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.
from
The Republic of Poetry |
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