for k

You sent me this book, years ago, and put a piece of it up in the world a while back that held for a month or more. There's many in here, one I'll save for the 6th, for my own mother. but in the meantime....

Around the Edges of A Cold Cold Day

Under the ice they're dragging the river,
but I don't mean for this to signify
some kind of casualty, some kind of loss.
Even now a bicycle is being stubbornly
pedaled around the edges
of this wintry day, the cold
snapping in its spokes, the red metal frame.
Hitting everyone in the face,
the fevered sun wants things
to be louder, a little something
in exchange for the patina, a little
something for all this gloss.

But just the breath of the figure
floating above the bicycle,
and that clump of warmth
I think I'll call his heart, pumping
petals wrapped in a flourescent wreath
of thorns, is just the evaporation of loss.

This day feels like it'll crack,
the ice will surely part and unveil
the flushed body of the guy
you heard of on the radio, finally
found, hunting underwater caribou
all these months; his wife still sweeping
the river with the hook of her mind.

Funny how the river lived.
Funny how my life continued.
All the glaring stories I walked over
as I collected my mail by way of the frozen
slough. They seemed solid as ice.
But how expertly I must have swum
through this prolonged winter, how deftly
I must have navigated this cold body
of water, not to have lost the feeling
in my fingers, this feeling in my lungs.

-- Olena Kalytiak Davis