Spring Thaw

I

With the mercury dip
The community collects like snow drifts
Where she brings him to the shore
Of the silvered lake
The expanse of white ice
Dotted with dark fishing huts

Hollow grating soaks into snow
The rust-dead wagon rattling
As they watch the men
Drag it out onto lake Stoco
Sacrificed to the harsh winter

And while warming icy hands
Beneath their shirts
She leans over to kiss the boy
But whispers instead that she is leaving

He watches the words crystallize
In the wet-pavement sky
Guessing that the day she departs
Will coincide with the thaw

Walking home through Tweed
Past decorated hydrants
Their painted faces laugh at him
Tell him to take the cold
Hold it in cast iron
Like a man

II

One February night he dreams of white
As blizzards whip Siberia outside
Burying the town’s water main totems
In a glacial grey lace

He shivers
In that witching-hour darkness
As she traces soft circles on bare skin

Warm like a morning light mantle
Slowly eclipsing

This winter breaks the record
The coldest the town remembers
And even time becomes brittle
Shattering into jagged fragments

So they hibernate in that damp basement

Forgetting her departure

III

But two months can’t last forever
And ice thins with days
Until on the eve of her parting
A clown-faced hydrant bursts
Spewing frigid wet

While their love melts

Now
As March sun
Brushes tall shadows over receding snow
Her tail lights fade down Highway 7
And lake Stoco moans
And swallows

Turning from the asphalt shoulder
The young man
Takes satisfaction in his prediction

While standing in the warmth of dusk
Looks out at a cracked ice lake
Regretting the spring thaw