You had an
aberrant flamboyance of vision
The turning of the year
mattered not to you
And all the things that weighed heavy on me
this worst of years
You said no, I didn't understand:
because the stag beetle still flies,
and the glaciers are not here
Did I not remember Pech Merle
where we starved when the reindeer did not come?
Or the stench of the pyres of Piraeus
in the plague years
when even the Spartans fled in fear?
I didn't.
But you,
you had an ice-age stare
And I kept talking to you, from my warm home.