Cresting Bone
I know a guy with no hat, no mittens who lives in the arctic and keeps icicles in his big stainless-steel cooler. I asked him to store the whalebone I found for safekeeping. I tripped over it when out for a walk in the summer. The frozen tundra softening to reveal this arc of bone, grey, fraying. Kill the light you say, and I don’t say Kill the moon that illuminates your face when it is full or blue or super or just mooning you now that you are here with your shoes on and ready to scramble down the rocks to where the blue herons stand on one leg or the other. Their footing sure, not lost like mine when I yanked both whalebone and gun from the muddy tundra. Gun that killed the whale perhaps. Its chamber still heavy with two bullets. One for each hour that disappears into the horizon. Night lengthens like my hair, we all grow long and tired. Even the tides slow their constant motion to scrub the earth clean. There is an infinite line in time that artists dream about when they sleep under a super blue moon. Some days winter slips in overnight like an iceberg that’s drifted to moor here in my front yard. I can walk out the door, across the porch and directly onto it. My bare feet remembering winter. Ice like sandpaper rubbing a burn across my soles. The guy with no hat and mittens knows this cresting bone.