Swimming in an overturned ocean

The smiling sun smiles down in its fire
and the frozen earth refuses to thaw.
So it creaks and groans and deems Winter a liar--
with its spillway of light and its heated jaw

that laughs out with the chill and the bleak bitter days,
in a slow, fluid fashion, washing across
a valley of ice and of chimneys and sleighs
and of withering icicles dripping on frost.

In a blank-faced stare of the emptiest blue,
this crevice-town, in our homes we dwell.
Just a harbor in overturned ocean view,
a strange coral reef with a seamount shell.

Like the Inuit, sheltered, we live off our shore,
sharing midday drinks with that smiling sun,
our pikatti, "My friend! Come and suffer no more--
for you've pounced on the mountains and lived on each one--

and there isn't much time, none at all, for these things.
Round the rooftops you stroll and you drift every day,
and we've seen how austere this alone-ness can be
firsthand. Condescend, please pikatti, and stay."

Yet the smile persists in the ice-covered glare
of those faraway lakes on horizon confines
and we're silenced and still in the life that we share
with our valley of white, our wintry shrine.