White River

One New Year’s Day wind from the Columbia Gorge rained ice on our snow- 

covered city block, coating ten inches with a crust my light child self 

could walk on without breaking through. No one else was around, my family 

home with post-holiday flu, my friends hostages in their houses. I walked 

without falling on the stilled white river of a magical world, because I’d opened 

my front door at just the right or maybe wrong time and found a place 

that was always there only now I could see it and walk on it. I got as far 

as the bottom of the hill before the slipping began and then I wondered 

what else I needed to do, what turn of my wrist what incantation would take me 

up that hill and into whatever it was I expected, which can last a lifetime 

I know now, the certainty of living a gesture, a word away from what I should be.