/ Poetry /
It’s January 2006 and here’s how cold it is:
Everyone’s wearing armor under their jeans. It’s a clear day and
everyone’s catching their breath back from the sudden solid
mountainsides of wind pealing in from off the lake and
knifing between buildings as they’re crossing Princess Street.
Everyone’s already breathless, already been laid flat
by the last big nasty blast. At the crosswalk, everyone walks
with a jaywalker’s kind of rushing gait to class and
back, expecting trouble with the concrete,
suspicious of the sidewalks on inadequately salted mornings.
Everyone’s knees are flexed. Everyone’s soles hover midstep,
muscles braced, gloved hands’ fingertips
turned up like talons as they anticipate
the slip, hard jar, swing and
precarious warp, the moment of falling or not falling
as RMC boys, pink-shaven and eighteen, glance
at premeds’ heads bleached white with frosted lips rushing
out of biolab at Queen’s, and they are months away
from Kandahar. If you ask me ten years from now
what to say about that, I won’t know where to begin,
but if you ask me now, I’ll know exactly what it means. In any case,
when the bars let out at 2 a.m., people still want ice cream.
A man comes into the Dairy Queen straight from the Penitentiary and
while he’s ordering he tells you how for literally years inside he’s been
dreaming of the strawberry-banana milkshake that you’re about to make, and
after the lateshift, when you finally get inside, your skin
will be corpse-cold for hours, but in the meantime
your housemates show me how their handles of vodka
froze outside on the back porch at the co-op, everybody laughs, and
I do verb tables at the kitchen table, amo amas amat, my passport
in the pocket of my coat hung by the door beside my bus ticket
back to Massachusetts, my coat with everyone else’s coats
piled up, and with everyone else one-by-one having made it home and
only you still out, I count the sparrows in my lap
as the city transubstantiates against the weather front.
The barometric pressure blathers, amo amare amatus, I promise
I promise I promise. I do not love what love is.
I do not love being a subject in a democratic monarchy,
I do not like being a non-resident alien
in a constitutional republic. I do not love grammar,
amabo amabis amabit, but time has teeth: its course
deposes, sublimates. The body undergoes
a change of state, sprawls across continents, throws a leg over
weeks half-remembered, straddles everything come and
gone and come back since. It’s January 2006,
the kind of cold where you can feel it killing you:
the breathlessness and racing heart is really
you, just starting to die. I won’t be able to say for years
how cold it is. It does not translate
in present tense. I won’t be able to say
until ten years from now what this means,
what it is to come in from the cold.