Extubating You

Extubating You

to walk out into that kind of cold while holding you knowing I'd walk back, I'd have to, alone...

Because it's inevitable: the tongue on the rim

of the mug touching the newest chip of the now

exposed unglazed clay, or if not the tongue, the lip

yes, the one I cut sliding up against writing

about you even though it was all true and couldn’t be

couldn’t be! truer, like the tree bent from

the left to reach the side of the beaver pond path

gone ecstatic stiff one year in a quick ice and blizzard

wind it dipped its head and shoulders in

the water and it cost the tree it’s entire

backbone so that today walking by is walking

under her arch otherwise it’s water

and who can walk on that or who wants to

even in clean ice that hasn’t seen snow

yet you know how it all slows down and yields

and the chips and the glazed gray eye of it

come later much later, in the  middle where it’s thin

or thinner where it suffers

a bob house and a man where it once fell through

and him too, bed and all but he was froze

solid that’s what someone said but he fished

still living while I drew out slush from the new hole

I breathed back into it and soon the lick of wet

and dry wet and dry split the lip and it bled

and I kept at the blood I kept it all to myself

sometimes between my teeth sometimes a pucker

sometimes nothing but me dreaming I was

walking beneath that birch that went out

and over into the pond and still does it goes out

and over from one edge of the world

to the other they say those that’s starved

of oxygen start to hallucinate like a fever’s took

their brain and they start saying things crazy

things so ok tell me how can any crack

in the glass or the back woods path like that

while I catch my breath to jump be avoided?