"Cold now,
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.
I think of summer with its luminous fruit
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handsful of grain.
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we always had, secretly
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe
that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest, we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers."
-Mary Oliver-
Is this what the cold is to me? A love of my own bones? Ack, perhaps. Perhaps. Yet it is more than a love for my bones; it is a love for my muscles, and a desire they should be limber and swing loose and free, bidden rather by brain than by reflex. All winter my muscles are tense, wound taught about my skeleton, contracting, compacting me like a crocus sewn shut by night, and my mind grows effete from the gale. I read of beetles in tropical climates and count the hours till the thaw.
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