finally to thaw

her voiceless breath
and i reached for the ready door
a lonely sidewalk with no footprints
so i followed
to frost crystals in a forest fortress
and an abundance of shelf fungi parade ground straight
overhead cracked branches and brazen crows
opening an open window wider and full of snow
making quiet noise
in no time unable to speak
a poetic hiding place without poets
a postcard perfect drifting
pure and simple and possibly perilous
smoothed out of a raw country
smuggled out of the prior spring like rare jewels
and slipping underneath an overhang of glacial rock
hardly ancient yet darkly old
once again the subject comes up
with a far more telling image of solitude
hidden away inside the cold cold cave
far from a burning hell:
our shivering skin,
shaking like an early alarm,
struggling to grasp heat from a faint sun,
but wrapped together in a warming embrace
mingling air
nose to nose
one into two without mathematical calculations,
having drifted from a pillowed room
into unmapped territory
blown by circumstance up a gentle hill
on a winding path that the deer have trimmed
finally melting
finally to thaw.