To drink boiled snow is good science.

It may affect the water table

to manufacture boiled snow on the rocks

218º Fahrenheit for however many minutes.

 

To skate on black ice is hard science

looking down through it to a broken and frozen rowboat

six feet under in Davy Jones’s Locker

in black tie in the middle of the night,

 

walking on thin ice, to skate on the

leading edge of thin ice, as abraded maple

leaves’ patterns trip you up.  To drink

unboiled sap as the deer do, clandestinely

 

out of sap buckets, starting on Birthington’s Washday;

to discover in frozen sap

a distinctive new gelato!  Flavor

of the Month for March!  To write

 

most of a poem out of

infinitive clauses, to discover

in brackish tidepools much too early

harbor seals in camouflage on the rocks,

 

and to marvel at these seals’ poise and grace

as they blunder diffidently into and under the ocean.

 

 

 

 

Caroline Knox's eighth book, Flemish, will appear in April from Wave Books (www.wavepoetry.com).  Her work is included in Postmodern American Poetry:  A Norton Anthology, Second Edition (ed. Paul Hoover), New York, 2013.