After I had burned alive a spell, spellbound
by the burning that bound me, I saw
an Ice Cross rising down to me through sea-
blue sky. This Ice Cross was the eye’s cross,
submerged for years in the eye’s
aqueous humor, an iceberg crux cracked off the Pole
Star and splashed deep—all this time to the surface surging.
The burning melted off my skin like rime,
and the Cross’s seed-crystal ferned forth
like wiper fluid flash-freezing on a windshield.
Christ-frost plated the daylight,
a fast-branching, brittle fractal
sealing the spaces inside itself. At last
I could see the pane that separated me
from the one beyond me—a tiptoeing
child left out in the cold, eyes cupped
and trying to see in, his breath fogging the glass.