26 January 2025

By Philip Kuepper

The air was the color
of clear ice.
All hung cold.
I inhaled the clear coldness.
I felt filled with its cleanness.
The beach lay a lip
sipping at the bay
that lapped at the stern
of an overturned rowboat.
It lay furred with frost.
The aluminum of it was smooth.
The stillness of it moved me.
How could a thing
built to be active
also embody such stillness?
I was faced with the profound,
with a thing meant to live,
but in a state of death.
In my mind, I resurrected it.
I turned it upright.
I set it on the water.
I walked it forward.
I climbed aboard.
I armed it with oars.
I rowed it.
I rowed it out, mentally,
onto the bay,
where pockets of ice lay
filled with frozen water
the sun spent like money.
Melt lay every way,
stirred by the oars.
Slivered ice slurred
as it touched the oars.
It was a slow row,
this rowing in my mind.
It was a thoughtful rowing
at each dipping of the blades.
Then a gull cried,
breaking my concentration.
And the whole of the imagined
row sunk in the sudden
rising of another thought,
that I’d grown cold
standing there. A wind had risen.
A flurry of snow eddied
in the air around me.
I had become time
to seek shelter’s warmth.

(16 January 2025)