Arctic Accordion Poem by Scott Minar

In my other life, when I was a Polar explorer,
the cold was penetrating—like the way air enters
an accordion. Being raised by bears

though, I was used to it.I would wait at the rim
for something to move in the blue-black shimmering,
then drop a paw into the frigid surface,

pressed under my own image for a fish.
Sometimes I pulled up scales,
sometimes memory:

You wait at the water in all that cold.
Then you hear a kind of music
on the wind, as if it were schooling all around

and you hear it.
You're inside the music, everything
immediately around you, which in that moment

feels like everything there is. Then you are back
on your haunches, in the near silence of thought,
or the absence as you let go—

of memory, and it swims back toward that unlit quarter
beneath the frigid rim of something you
will never understand, even though it is quite familiar.