Mistaken for Ice, Air

110 REBECCA GIVENS ROLLAND MISTAKEN FOR ICE, AIR 1 . . . how quick is quick when one speaks of a geologic event.i Spring: the girl commands all doubt to blur out, traces of sadness erase. Black charges (a guilty house) falter; she runs downstream with lemon water, rituals. Ringed with hail marys, riddled with salt, she dives in, cranes shoulders into her hangdog back. Inside blue-lipped basins, clams chatter, open, accept her bold intrusion without fanfare. Slipped a disc, she’s sheriffed to weightlessness (this is how mummification feels)—suit-straps shift down, worms squat in nostrils’ gulfs, a breath-line shears one second from the next. Deep cleft in her ankles, she’s frightened, unbordered, a taster of remembrance’s fruit. Coral floats up (mutter, murder): she spits freely, suffering at the corners of her mouth. 1 Zebrowski, Ernest Jr. The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed 30,000 Lives. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002: 234. 111 2 In a short time St. Pierre took on the appearance of a gray-brown bog.ii Spring: what planes around her’s the hardest to follow, dust winding past her cheeks’ inner grooves. Soothed by nothing, carved out by nothing, she’s remained a weeping statue on her own. Danger cries out, four-winded, cobblestones blister and release, still she waits, even as rosebushes clot near her, crowding out the sparrow on her tongue. A crow, a waiting palm, golden-familiar: she’s flustered, but someone’s got to pull the plow. The heart must find some force to yank it forward, hand to give it anchor and keel. Look out the window, don’t do her favors—fixed-gazing, she’ll remain distracted by evening light. Fogged glass crams with pollen, yellows with decades’ indecision. Wherever she travels, try to bless her; let her footsteps be a sign of balance. Blinded, she tosses salt (hand over shoulder), stumbles through a rock-strewn field. ii Thomas, Gordon, and Max Morgan-Witts. The Day the World Ended. Chelsea, Michigan: Scarborough House Publishers, 1991: 185. ...