AUGURY
The grill kicks an orange hole in the season,
a
spear into ribs,
a thief in aisle eleven: I've laid hands on those
massive
midwest drills
+ imagined twisting one into a frozen lake til
water
quit its solid
seasonal stubbornness to reveal blinking life
beneath,
living stuff
which knows more ways to live with ice than I.
What
I know
involves occasional cocoa, salt on the side
walk,
recalled or fore
told equitorial stories, Costa Rica or warmer. The
salmon
hums bright
pink in the December dusk + the dog believes
falling
snow's a question
asked over and over again, he answers with barks,
sniffs
anxious
where his two-hours-back footsteps have dis
appeared.
The only
chance I've had so far I turned from the hole
in
the ice, watched
friends offer vividity to its depth, the lake
a
phone booth they
dropped the quarters of their youth into, hello...
we
all steamed in dark
together. Who knew. They hooted, I hung back.
And
what was it they
found or felt? That view, stars the endpoints
of
distant icicles. They
emerged dripping, touched blue. It's like going
through, they
said.
To where, to what. Who knew. Ellen loves me
despite
that I've
never manned up + dropped myself into
measured
harm
+ now the fish is ready, flesh flaky, out of place
in
this cold: we
make meals from whatever we can, set the table,
count
days till May,
pour the wine, dive in.
Weston Cutter's the
author of You'd Be a Stranger, Too, a
collection of stories, and the chapbooks All Black Everything and (0,0). He
runs the book review website corduroybooks.com and has poems coming soon in diode and Copper Nickel.