Come join me in the tundra, and forget the battery

Oh won’t you come with me, across the tundra to the other side? Will you help me build the next life here? It’s bright in the morning, and in the evening you burrow down in your thermal sleeping bag. You fall slowly, while your skin numbs up, you dream of yetis, dragons and bloody Laplanders that set the stage for Santa Claus.

I think of you now, when I’m falling off to sleep. I literally fall off a cliff each time I close my eyes. My arm, when it’s asleep, becomes a substitute for your hand, pulling the hair out of my face, when it’s the afternoon and I can’t bear to unlatch the hatch, secure the helmet, and venture out onto all that white death.

It’s comforting to get your letters. They come by helicopter drop. I don’t even see the person delivering the cargo. I know you’re there, at home drinking peach pear tea, waiting for the doorbell to announce the arrival of the delivered stranger. It only feels like betrayal the first time you’re with him, feeling out the depth and breadth of his waning affections. He’ll be gone in an hour, and you’ll lie on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and write me a letter, using the fading passion from the departed affair, that six foot bearded gentlemen you eyed at the gym, and told him, with a half-cocked nod of the head, that yes, you’ll be available for an hour, if you can spare it, right after I get home. Follow me, in the green bug, you’ll say, in your aloof manner.

Sometimes I can’t sleep and I'll turn on the bunker's little stove, and rock back and forth like I used to in the grand room in our house on battery, right in the bay, Charleston. Your heels would clack on the old cobblestone, and the misty air of the morning would chase us after one of those all night parties where we’d take leave, and hurriedly wind our way back through the squares, passed the towering mansions, breezily see the cannons and the iron balls in our peripheries before we inhaled each other. Sitting in front of that fire place in the main room you’d read Dylan Thomas in the grass afterwards, which would propel me back to where we met, that afternoon, in the winter time one hundred miles away, when we caught each other out in the snow, and that look you gave me let me know I’d have you until I returned once again to the tundra.