Ice

—for hockey

Say you came and saw snakes and salamanders
warren beneath snowy chandeliers,
saw rimecrusted paw prints, watched
humus freeze to tires, and heard an ice song,
heard the river purl under us. The habit of snow
is sleep, and you came to love its glass moods,
how sun was shared in a billion blinding pixels.
Say you came to believe you knew something
of us, our history perhaps, the investments
of our lives, legends, the laden hours of rain
and snow, the way we hold our secrets.
Say you learned this: the shave and spray
echoes the rustle of steel tuned to the warmth
of knives; it sings the infallibility of ice,
the knowledge of a razor’s need to glide,
a stick’s need to burn, as if it all, every sliver
of the rink and every broken player’s body
held on to the memory of fire, felt the desire
to burn the world down with skates.






Click here to listen to MIchael Johnson reading "Ice"






Michael Johnson is from Bella Coola, British Columbia. His work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Queen’s Quarterly, The Malahat Review, and The Southern Review, among others, and has been selected for the Best American Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry anthologies. He’s been a Pushcart nominee and a finalist for both the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He works as a wine consultant in Vancouver.