You & I

You and I escaped somehow,
and marched
toward the icy hill,
resplendent in our
torn nightgowns.

Wardens
screamed down,
but on we went,
kids damning the world
with a smirk.

Oh, how they sharpened their teeth—
on adamantine stones, no less—
till merely dutiful incisors became
fangs of assassins,
and their eyes turned scarlet
in the snowlight.

Haunted now,
we climbed on,
our bare feet bleeding
in the frost,
red rivulets behind,
and sang our one
demented
tune:

“Oh, where have you been,
Where have you been,
My dear one,
My sweet one?”

Along we sang
in that ghastly light,
and never stopped,
or stammered,
only marched and sang and bled,
ghosts of a doomed crusade,
pledged only
to the mist which assaulted our skin,
the cold which curled our lips,
the frozen path on which
the purple eels of our toes
squirmed and starved.

We never arrived,
never thought of arriving.
Going possessed us,
on and on,
no why or where,
squeezed on all sides by
screams and teeth and ice into
a single farcical speck of
terror and resolve,
refugees
made mute and ragged and blind—

But then

As if the earth itself had
sung out wreaths of springtime,
Song of Songs,
no why or where,
but singing too like ones who knew,
Arriving,
all meanness burned away,
feet healed upon green soil,
and from our eyes a trillion stars,
and never a thought
of the frozen camp
in which we had awoken
so bitterly
a century ago.