Originally published in Common Ground Review, Fall/Winter 2016

And So Above

There was no snow in Minnesota that year, only dry cold 

that froze the lakes into ballroom floors

four feet deep and the rest of the world 

was made of hard black dirt, so we dragged our

sleds down to the shoreline before

we hooked the dogs to them.

Other years are rough and tumble, 

driving over hillocks and snow banks,

long struts of frozen tracks, the occasional

thunk of a tree root. This year there is only

the smooth hiss of metal over ice,

the strangeness of speed

without interruption. Between my feet,

balanced on thin runners, the ground 

looks like a white record spinning.

This land has a dark belt of distant shoreline and

nothing else, all bared ice and sky,

and the dogs run with their tails whipped

straight-back behind them, their bodies plummeting

into the wind. Without snow to pile up

it takes miles to brake, so the faintest sense

of an island unstuck from the horizon is

enough to send one foot down

on the blade, both feet down, skimmed ice

flying up in waves, the dogs straining

against the new weight on their backs;

they don't want to stop. Why would they?

But we will make camp on this little

wet-black disk of land. We will get up

in the morning as the sky lights the ice

to eat pale sausage from a rough-edged plastic bowl,

to wake the dogs with their morning meat,

crimson-raw, thrown underhand to their

snapping engines, what beasts, our little

war-machines, the ground so hard and cold and the air 

so sharp we feel we could eat off 

a place like this, too, off a world 

so freshly infertile.