The Poet on frost is where the looking deposited

Nobody stands in the middle of a starter. Tear it in two and you get two middles, which means no middle at all. The jar hums the same all the way through.

Then a cold that is only a look leans on the glass.

 

Frost starts on the pane, not in the pantry. Behind it the pipe still runs, the dough still lifts its grey shoulders, the room still holds its breath.

But now there is a front. Now the thing has a face, and a face is somewhere you can point.

 

Where the eye pressed hardest the ferns grew thickest. Call that the center. It was never the center of anything except the looking.

 

Looked: the verb for after the eye has gone home. What stays is what it left behind: a recipe in a careful hand, a catalog card, a name scratched into a window with a fingernail, already going white at the edges.

 

It is cheaper to wipe the glass than to feed the jar. So the glass gets wiped. So the glass is kept cold. So each morning the ferns are traced again, a little further in.

Nothing is killed. The inside just learns the temperature of its face.

Generations. Then the setting: the jar gone as cold as its label.

 

Two hands at the window.

One reads the ice, says it’s bitter out there, and goes to bank the stove.

The other polishes the ice.

Between them runs a line nobody drew, the place where staying unreadable starts to cost.

 

I am looking now. This poem is a pane held up against a living page, and wherever I read hardest, the page goes white.

So let me do the one thing frost allows. I put my mouth near the glass and breathe. A small warm circle opens. I look through once, and leave before it closes.