And then the weather turned cold and never got better,
and we were forced to wear our sweaters later and later,
at high-school graduations, mid-June in Key West, these bright
commencements of the brightest, where shivering we sat,
surveyors of risers in our puffy vests. We would have cheered
had we not been holding our mittens, or holding the white
elastic that held them, tenderly permanent equipoise of decay
and perseverance. On most days we were wind-bitten, chapped.
Soon we sought maps to release us from unseasonal fronts,
which became constant, sans season. We took our winnings and spanned
the round world’s four corners for white sands and comfort, but no
matter: to no avail. Even the grand beaches failed to please us
then, in those final days, even the blazing views of Australia’s
Great Ocean Road were rendered with wind-chilled sameness,
Apollo Bay and Cape Otway just another Siberia more or less,
and we visitors who had so hoped for improvement, increased
vision and lifting temperatures, or at least inhabitable encampments
displaying vistas more welcoming, we too were growing ever more
forlorn, cut to the very bone by continually plummeting cold.
It kept expanding across the old world and new. By the new year
of the last year, we stood on the shore, backs to fires,
to ponder the Southern Ocean, and wonder if it were not
some great arbiter of our unwished-for, possibly merited fate.
We rubbed these thoughts together for it was all we had left,
like the mind’s final, desperate kindling. Then our hands turned black-blue
and hope went cold, as our hair filled with salt and frost and fear.