*ice-crunch* Above the ridge the dark kept opening Not empty Layered Not silent Ringing I tilted my face and the night became architecture Three arches of impossible patience And I was small enough to understand In the Swiss Alps the snow held blue after midnight My breath kept leaving me in pale receipts The Milky Way bent once Then again Then once more A triple arch sewn over the mountains And zodiacal light climbed the black like a quiet fire No billboard could survive that width No doctrine could contain it The stones were colder than language The pines smelled sharp as struck glass I stood there with my animal pulse Trying not to reduce the sky to adjectives How do you look at scale this clean And keep pretending your life is central How does the chest stay closed When the dark is this full of doors Triple arch over me Triple arch over me Make my little fear a weather pattern Triple arch over me Triple arch over me Turn my mouth to light and meter Oh-oh, I can hear the heavens lean Oh-oh, I am smaller than serene Somewhere above the auroral math and magnet shame The solar wind was running 510 kilometers each second Invisible violence Invisible caress Particles crossing the dark like urgent script And down here my blood kept ordinary time One heart-kick at a time into the snow The universe is rude that way It gives you beauty with numbers attached It says behold and calculate It says tremble and learn the units It says the cold can still be intimate The sky was not kind The sky was magnificent There is a difference There is a gift in that difference Triple arch over me Triple arch over me Make my little fear a weather pattern Triple arch over me Triple arch over me Turn my mouth to light and meter Oh-oh, I can hear the heavens lean Oh-oh, I am smaller than serene If I disappeared tonight The mountain would keep its shape The zodiacal veil would keep climbing The particles would keep arriving And somehow that does not erase me It rinses me It clears the cheap film from my thinking It says you are brief So be brilliant while brief Triple arch over me Triple arch over me I am not the center, I am included Triple arch over me Triple arch over me Write me in with frost and lucid blue Oh-oh, every star becomes a seam Oh-oh, every seam remakes the dream Triple arch over me Triple arch over me I came here one body and left here plural *wind, then distant sequencer hum* The ridge goes still The snow goes silver My breath goes home slowly But some part of me stays arched In that impossible blue-black room