Bearings on a Winter Evening

Masked and tooled, I begin
moving through the rock
corridors of these underground
waters, through the black

channels and caves of these rivers
existing far beneath the white
expanse of forests and roofs
and fields so open to the sky,

so still within the spatial
silence of snow. I imagine
moving deliberately in the dark
beneath this winter landscape,

pausing and proceeding, mapping
the many passageways carved
and flooded by the rising seas
of past retreating glaciers

and ancient mountains of ice,
the welling of freshwater springs.
As I inch along the stone
hallways, marking the network

of their patterns, the complex
flow of their tidal and rainfall
currents, I imagine I am sitting
in this chair beside this window

watching the pale gray edge
of the horizon slowly blur
with snow and vanish. I can see
that the universe of winter snow

is merely light lit from within,
illumination suffused and expanding
in all dimensions. I recognize
myself residing within the equation

of this configuration. I close my eyes
and rest there. The torch I carry
in these black river tunnels, mazed
like catacombs, sputters inside its glass.

I falter. It re-ignites. I remember
and resume. Through time and time
again, without stars or sun, among
the cilia of tiny albino creatures,

the swirl of transparent fish,
the fragile weave of their skeletons
more imagined than witnessed,
among the staring blindness

of the primordial and the unidentified,
I adhere to the turns and necessities
of my direction. In the chair beside
this window, I hold my wrappings close,

will my way along these submerged
galleries, aim for the juncture
where all rivers flowing from all
dimensions converge. I imagine

I will be indivisible - so the solid
night of rivers underground,
so the light of winter, so fact
and anti-fact - in the confluence
of that creation.