It was two o'clock, but the sun was already low

as we headed down a different way.

By now, a January thaw had turned

the breathless streams of our ascent

to brawling tenors,

and the snow dimpled

over ice-bridges full of melting tracks.

 

You halted us at the edge,

jabbed for rocks with your telescoping poles.

“Step here, and here,” you said, torsioning back

to point them out.

At the next crossing, I ventured first—

“If it holds me it will hold you.”

Fathers should lead.

 

When I went through the ice, a long time

passed before I heard the scrape

of snowshoes on rock and knew

I would stop sinking.

Miraculous fibers keep the water out,

even when it's up to your waist. 

But my boots were old and cracked.

The water crept into them, pulling me down.

 

I heard you tell me not to move,

and then you dragged me out across the ice

by my shirt-collar.

 

This trek was your gift, snowshoeing

up to the ravine where every winter,

with friends, you skied the headwall,

while your mother and I imagined horrors.

At the trailhead lodge we’d had breakfast

with the wilderness medicine trainees.

They were learning to heal and save

in an uninhabitable world:

avalanche, fracture, frost-bite, hypothermia.

How to cross a snow-slope, or an icy stream.

 

We'd left them to their lessons

down in the Notch.

 

The ravine was empty, overcast.

The quiet cradled our voices before they went out.

You pointed uphill at the lid of clouds. 

“The headwall’s up there.”  I saw

gray nothing.

We ate under a house-sized rock

whose reflected heat had scooped out

seats from the snow-pack.

We saw the clouds lift.

The blue ice of the headwall floated out

showing crevices like staves of—Bruckner?

One of that destiny-

stricken generation.

I cannot think who, now.

 

Driving home we made up the delays. 

Traffic was light. You let me drive.

Under our intermittent talk,

radio voices stumbled, disappeared,

and staticky melodies gave way

one to the next.