Ice

People are duck-walking, The ice has stuck, only the sky just above my top lip is melting. I move forward by counting the parked cars on this side of the morning. A bundled-up woman I knew from last winter stares at me, she is way across the street, sheets of black ice divide is. Hands wave inside suede mittens makes me think of cold kittens like the one I did not save one winter, abandoned, it looked past me into its own abandonment. today it’s me out here in the dead-eyed light. The woman across the sheet ice is a figure under a skating sky. I imagine that she only believes in a warmer memory of me, figments are fragments on this cracking ice. She was in service in Vietnam she nursed, this part of her I remember, but the weathered face underneath her mouth-covering scarf does not smile at me. She is done with healing. I understand, why should we even try a pleasantry abandoned as we are on this street that keeps sliding forward forgetting for us our last but one footsteps.