Hurry south, then, as you always do when
snow clouds bruise the mountain tops, and
I wax my snowshoes and fill my canteens
to go again into a storm looking for myself
Again I say, “Come with me,” as I always do,
warn you it’s easy to get lost when nature
changes into white and night and day grow
as different as you and I have become
Remember, it’s you who sits in front of a wood stove
strumming your sitar sipping herbal tea,
keeps saying you don’t know me anymore,
that my face is hidden behind a bushy white beard,
my once boyish feet are hard with calluses,
my hands cool and moist
It’s you who still brings up that night
I said I needed something more,
I needed howling wind,
that night I walked away from you
shivering at the door begging me not to leave,
the snow so wet and cold and hurtful your eyes
watered more than tears
All you could see was my silhouette, my tracks, me
making my way like some kind of hairy Sasquatch,
paddling side to side with ski poles in powdery confusion
until you saw nothing, felt nothing, nothing but ice
How pitiful I looked the next morning, you said, moustaches
crusted with mucous and frost and crying and sadness,
wanting you to greet me with your own tears, wanting
you to take me back as if nothing had ever happened
You said I was someone else with the same name
of the man who wrote you love poems and created
exquisite dinners and cut wildflowers along the road
You said I didn’t have the same eyes,
my mouth was weighted down by snow
You said I had become what I always wanted to be,
a man of snow and for all you cared I could take
as many winters as I wanted to find the man I had lost
So, hurry south again to stretch in the sun,
and I’ll strap on snowshoes, parka and mittens,
try to find again what could not be found
when my face was young, my hands loving, my feet
as youthful and soft as you remember them
And if I return from where I‘ve been lost,
beardless, my hair in silver ringlets,
lambent longing in my eyes,
a poem in one hand, a hyacinth in the other,
can we be lovers still?