Walking the Ice by Carol Potter

tracks of animals that went walking
…on the frozen river today

light enough to stand anywhere
…to walk one frozen block at a time

water banging along beneath
…ready to take whatever weighs

too much      the river not a river
…you might be able to step across it one

chunk to another   I hold my breath as
…the dog follows a scent into the center no

telling where there might be a gap
…covered by this dust of new snow

and I think of Barbara who rode ice floes
…on the Connecticut as a child leaping one

to another who leapt inside out who
…died of a brain tumor just down river

from Vernon   who never paid taxes who
…rode under that wire   who died at 33   who

made love to me in that cabin in Wendell
…no water  no electricity  no phone  the weed

we smoked    the Jameson    the wood stove
…burning    who vowed she would not

die in the hospital    would take herself out
…into the woods and end it but she

held onto it    this thing    we cling to   ragged
…as it gets

Carol Potter is the 2014 winner of the Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press for her fifth book of poems, Some Slow Bees. Forthcoming publications include poems in Plume, and The Laurel Review. She lives in Vermont and teaches for the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program.