WHEN THROUGH THE HOTEL ROOM WINDOW WE . . . Poem by Peter Verhelst

. . . hand palms against the glass. Deep at night we watch
the glacier, two wisps of smoke that needed centuries
to entwine against the mountainside. What we see,
what we want to see, is the slowest form of lava
we want to be. My cheek a few millimetres
from your cheek and you move your head as if tilting it
to the first sun. Two pebbles of soft flesh, rubbing endlessly
slow against each other, hoping for that one spark one day,
for that one miniscule throbbing, that open and closing of
a wafer thin heart that is being breathed out of the ice. That
this might be our heart, this breathing, this pulsing from one to the other,
this age-long waiting, who would be the first to move, who
smiled, the drinking of breath, this filling up of breath
and this emptying of rooms, of your veins, the melting
of the small glacier we are, this quivering we dream of,
of something simple, breath scrunching above the ice. Hymns. Pure
springs. Geysers. Fresh rainbows. The magnificent avalanche
that causes this.