JESUIT

black cloak kicks its way
through the marauding storm 
across this month of ice
drifts me toward the endless far shore

	gleaming
	smooth

dark in the distance as your forgotten eyes
the slash of painful red on your chest.
 
there is nothing so deep
 as the diver’s call
 	nothing
 save your tracks before me

heart shaped
	empty

I trudge this trail alone
remembering the sun
 as it slipped between your fingers
and beneath the far ridge of our skins
 
so far away on a northern wave you ride
I hear you with my hands
and taste your ache
in salt on my lips
burning through this winter sky

	waiting
	waiting

until the time of cracked ice 
	opens me
to summers of river longing
and the lost call of the northern diver

© Leslie Smith