While Skating I

The day snaps the tails of my winter coat,

whoops sharp between brittle birch branches,

dervishes down again to skate with me, drives

stinging sugar-dust in loops and whorls

across the blinding burnished silver ice.

Against white silence, the blades of my skates

scrape and scratch the diamond skin of the lake

until the bone-deep crack of the ice

ricochets off snow-dunes and snow-fields

and I am under, in the dim murky black

and the cold begins to burn and my lungs convulse,

drawing black ice, and I thrash and I fight

my way back to the grey of the day I hope is up —