I want to show
a certain day
of late winter, 1984,
snow on the ground.
The lake was frozen.
No ducks, no geese.
I threw chunks of ice
and listened to them skitter.
I threw them high,
as hard as I could,
for the sheer joy
of useless, unwitnessed doing.
They made parabolas,
missiles failing orbit,
then crashed and shattered,
fragments skating this way and that.
Ice on ice, conserving momentum,
made notes, whale eerie,
no, not so, notes like
no others, plaintive, pale.
The making of the sound was
between ice and ice,
but the air that carried
altered and added.
And what of the ear?
The surprise of hearing,
the isolate encounter,
illustrates something else.
That the unanticipated
simply exists is uncanny.
No logic explains the openness
that freezes us taut, frees us.