Tettegouche

Wasn't it supposed to be bearably cold,
wasn't it going to be relaxing;
I twist and turn in my sleeping bag,
the water in my glacial bottle
frozen inside the tent stares at me.

My backpack is a crumpled bonsai hillock
which has seen a little rain –
I wish it had flintstones,
sharp enough to wound this cold into flame.

The ceiling dips with frost weight
where condensation collects like thinking.
A faint thud, thud, thud
pulses in the seam above.
I time it against my breath.
It drifts. Or my breath does.
Satellites, or what I take for them,
cross the seam of the fly,
keeping their appointments over the frost.
I drag my heels against each other,
sock on sock, as stunned friction
of my tired feet recalls
the shape of heat.
A hush breaks like bark splitting
and wakes the wind in passing.

I had taken the ridge past Shovel Point.
The snow there lay in drifts –
not deep, just wind-arranged.
The basalt cracked in vertical seams
as Gitchi-Gami drew in subnivean runoffs.
My sister said there were five appointments
in a week – fifty Grays, stereotactic.
I was not there back home.
Balsam and spruce, lichens, stood around
the exposed rhyolite; distant, gentle,
infinitely weathered.

We took the long way back,
inland on the one road,
through Finland, which is a town,
past Castle Danger, which is one too,
where nothing has happened yet
to anyone we know.
Everyone was quiet, Lightfoot sang,
we let the wreck keep sinking until
Hyungjin said Minnesota Fats
once fished trout out of a snow-fed spring
using only his pool cue
and pan-fried it on a hot license plate.
Somewhere south of the split rock
the station gave out.
The radio filled with snow,
    the sound snow would make
        if it were sent,
and nobody reached over.
Mikayla kept serving the road in vlogs:
wind-noise, dashboard confessions, brief stops.

We used to watch the flintstones
with the volume off to see if we could tell
when the canned laughter came in.
My sister kept a tally,
convinced it followed no pattern.
"They laugh when Wilma shuts
the fridge", she noted,
"but not when Barney falls off a roof".

She said the nausea never stopped.
At night, she tuned into vividh bharti.
The songs come up the dark
from a city on no route of ours,
to her room exactly.

I shall call her when I reach Minneapolis –
after bhule bisre geet.