Cold Song

What power art thou, Who from below, Hast made me rise, Unwillingly and slow, From beds of everlasting snow!

See'st thou not how stiff, And wondrous old, Far unfit to bear the bitter cold.

I can scarcely move, Or draw my breath, I can scarcely move, Or draw my breath.

Let me, let me, Let me, let me, Freeze again... Let me, let me, Freeze again to death!

--by John Dryden

from 

Henri Purcell's Opera King Arthur

I must keep writing; the cold fingers--arthritic, gnarled--are not the nimble dancers that they once were.  Before, as memory serves, a pas-de-deux of ungloved hands skimmed lithely over your geography.  You were toe-shoe tall but shrouded by the snow-white sheet.  

Sleeping.  

Hard.  

My hands found you, the edge of you, the end of the sheet's feigned modesty, the beginning of you.  

Cue music.  Focus the blue spot.  My fingers spread, left and right, enthusiastic fans.  Their bright aura breaks up the intrusion of that mechanical sun.  I am lost in an amphitheater of dreams.  I hear the blades carve grace and graffiti into the frozen surface.  I hear the audience murmur.  I hear them bill and coo.  The landscape is familiar, even in the winter blindness.  The northern lights are taffy tangling around my hands.  The ice is illuminated from inside.  The mirrored ball spins.

Later that night, we are wandering amidst the drifts that artists carve for Winter Carnival, reshaping them into moments stolen from fairy tales:  the vanquished monster, the victor's elaborate throne. You climb into the king's lap;  his patience is an invitation.  The torches are lit--inside the brains of fevered geniuses, in some hundred tender beating hearts, along the trail that leads to the shy shores of the little hidden lake--and the flames dance their orange light into the dark and eerie corners of the leafless woods.

On a wool blanket, we lay close together. You are feeding off my heat, the furnace of my hands.  They skate over the white ice of your skin.  

You melt.  

You shiver.  

In sleep, the terrain that makes you begins to flatten out.  This is to be expected, like slow erosion and the drift of continents, all the forces of weather and time.  The land, now glaciated, lies buried beneath memory, compressed and crushing the rocks under the weight of all the tripping dancers that have mastered the parquet floor--freshly waxed and shimmering beneath the slipper of the moon--and now in pairs dare the ice to open up, crack and crackle under their weight of two, of you and some other, faceless in the dream.