The Age of Ice

Reflecting on you and the lake ice, I watched how it broke up
in wintertime, huge blocks working against each other
as they shifted their positions, the sound at night
like the call of a single whale wailing for another
on an empty sea under a dark new moon.
I saw those times we took the time to stop the clock,
how as the snowflakes fluttered down outside
your window they would hover there, magically waiting,
refuse to fall until our hour had come to see the morning sun.
That cannon fire of dawn to a night when no snow fell
because we’d stopped it, held it up, caused it to defy gravity,
then finally let it start down again, each flake set free,
the brightness and the bustle of our daily lives
dictating it to be all right for everything to go back as before.