Wander winter coastlines,
Curving snow-capped sandbars,
White-caps and eddies carving
Curling glyphs into the continent.
Shapes with cold resonance,
Meanings I stand too close to see.
From here, the rimey lines reaching
Out to my fingertips feel like traction.
As if they were hooks holding my breath and then
Drawing the air out of me to hang unread
Smoke signals before dissipating like
Whispered words for distant ears.
Where the gray sky disappears into gray seas,
Horizon pours through my eyes,
And the frequencies between the sullen air molecules
Suddenly hum in sympathetic consonance with my lungs.
Some deep hollow reverberates in my chest.
It rattles me until I can no longer tell whether I am inhaling
Some communication sublimating from the frost,
Or slipping into a seasonal apophenia that grips me.
After all, fingerprints are less about friction
Than heightening sensation, creating grooved channels
To convey information more diligently to nerve endings.
Or maybe it is just the chilled air making
My exposed hands raw.
Steady circulation thrums deeper on each pass,
Bringing warming blood back up
To the starved synapses which were misfiring in the cold.
I know I've written this same poem over,
At least once for each year reaching five years past.
But each new telling scopes outward, I hope,
Rotating slightly before repeating its routine,
Encoded mathematical structures, fractal data,
Meaning held in the riven ridges of my fingertips
Flowing into the channels of jack frost,
Drifting from each snowflake on up
Until I can see it blown big down the eastern seaboard
And catch some hidden message
Not entirely evident to me when standing
Up so close to the shoreline.
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