The Ice Writer

Out into the cold

goes the line you'll draw

across this pond.

Under the deep dark

its track runs true

as a dream: darknesses

of line and sky, moving

towards each other

bruised and blue.

Listen. Night is its own weather.

A stillness gloves

sheet-ice and sedge, that cluster

of willows above

the darkening rim.  When

you break the silence and move,

alarm thuds an ice drum

tuned tight as the skin

that binds your bones –    

In an elegant

enlarging lens, silver, ornée, you

and the moon drown

together, like Swinburne's sexy noyades… Go

on, then: where glass

waits to splinter, and every step's new,

your skates hush-hushing

each stroke onwards

against your water-double – each thrust

into that broken mirror

where moonlight

hurls your shadow forward –

And the line behind you brightens

in crystal then darkens to damp

as you draw it out

of your perfect future, that blank

you erase

with every turn as you bank

on a widening curve you recognise –

it's your own music:

 and the ice-star at your foot pulses alive

to the hollow of your wrist,

your owl-hoot cry.

Night-beasts whisper

their weird alarms as, arms wide

with air, you follow the line you've yet to make:

this water-snake the sky

also traces; the border joining these dark

twinned weights,

night and water.

…And it's you, you, bruising

the dream membrane

that holds them apart –

when out into the pond's

cold eye

you go, alone.