with love and admiration

From Robert Creeley...

What was resistance.
How come to this.
Wasn't body's package
obvious limit,

could I fly,
could I settle,
could I even
be I...

And for what want,
watching man die
on tv in Holland, wife
sitting by.

She said, "He's
going off alone
for the first time
in our lives,"

He told her,
"to the stars, to the
Milky Way,"
relaxed, and was gone.

As if the words could somehow make a painting of this great, frozen, and wide open Midwestern landscape. The cold licks the edges of my flushed skin (internal fire buttressed but yet painfully ephemeral) and as the ice-packed grass crunches beneath our boots she asks, aren't you cold? A self-conscious glance (despite myself) at my white and chapped and numb fingers and a loose smile plays across my lips as I pretend to forget the question. The playful cry of two coyotes off in the distance and our eyes meet, the answer traveling quickly across the wind-chilled night air, the way sound does in winter. Taillights, mirror images, we point our terrestrial skiffs back out into the crush of early morning frost, the world around preparing for its annual thinning, all things subsiding back into themselves.