Let us pretend it is not becoming dark so quickly.
The best days are the first, the unrevealed countries,
rebuked in cold and flare in the blue underground of our knuckles. 
We grin fiercely in our bewilderment,
figures tramping the crimped borders of a white bay,
stripped to the outskirts of our bareness.
This place brings me to say all there is,
and you listen, the outstretched land patient as you,
my reckoning of young boughs and the faith
that is released to the slackening gravity of your body,
you, liquid animal that roots up out of the earth to
devour the light of air from the faltering season so that
no wonder you relish the tongues of water encountering the ice
in the beaver pond, you say, and we walk like this,
hopeful we will pause inside its resolve, cheerful
children who skim uncertainly into the quartz lake,
we are unsure of the extent that is required to be steadfast,
and I stare at your shoulders, your funny boots. Your clumsy steps.
That I long to imitate with my own. What is it I need to hear from you?
I wonder, falling through the ice, would your breath hold
until you, staunch and seemingly barren in your isolation,
were taken for a deer in the distance, and farther,
a raven in the tamarack, or in the end
the remittance of snow on the tip of the tongue
until I was, as they say, all but gone?
Then, would the lungs fill in lament, reminding
the air the warmth of your rhapsody.