Life Above the Permafrost
- Alice Fulton

All winter the trees tossed in their coma.
Beneath them fields unrolled
like a pallet. Snow came,
the universal donor, the connective
in all the ready metaphors:
sky coarse as hotel linen,
bedsheets the half-white of rice
paper. That kinship.

Prone as the land,
I wanted each day to start
the way the body starts in sleep: a reflex
of sun, mimosa explosions. Not
the window's slow tap of sky,
light rising like sap
in maples, and even the maples
warted with sparrows
too frigid to fly South.
Those trees needed wild flamingos, at least,
to break their drowse.

In bed, my nails raked
the chenille spread, its whitework
like a mulch of snow. Snug as a corm
in its coldframe, the heart
shied from my five-fingered tongs.

Now there are parasol garnishes
on the rum drinks of summer, Adirondack
chairs with wind in the slats. Your arms band
me like a migratory bird. I think,
this must be life
above the permafrost. The raised candle-
wicking of the quilt
cornrows our skin. Our fingers braid
like aerial roots.

You make me want
to stop tending relics in my head,
that well-stocked potter's field:
just listen to the insects'
adenoidal plainsong all day long,
enamored of the keynote, the tonic.

(from Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, 1983)