Ice Queen, on [a] Pane
Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.
1.
Elizabeth
I wrote on her
prison window—I mean,
Elizabeth I wrote
on her
prison window
with a diamond,
gemlike betrayal
of the pain
clear pain
pane that sep-her-ates
breath from air,
hot air cold glass
hard gas becomes
stone, an elemental
betrayal
the contain-heir
contain her
container
scratch your story
2.
Ice prison engages me, engages me—a diamond ring
I feel for, I mean, it’s slippery, this ice that Matthew
McConaughey called “frosting,” too hard and too
changeable at once, elementally unstable: temporary.
3.
I scream.
4.
Ice cream, at the skating rink,
where I fell, and he gave me /
ice he’d scraped off the surface,
dirty, my feet and this defeat.
5.
I see it now from my
own window
pain:
a spider web clinging,
turned to ice, harder than a web
but vulnerable to
heatstory,
and without a die man,
I cannot make a mark
sharp enough,
hard enough
to see myself in
this ice pain
this glass pain
that separates me from
icesilk storythreads clinging
to the pane’s unbreakening.
—Emily Bowles