I was just in a snowstorm in Utah and remembered this poem--

Ice

In late November

The Danish transplants--

landlocked 

squeezed up against the Rockies by the great west desert--

Would set loose their carefully caged and managed waters,

let them wash out over miles of flat table land,

and wait for the freeze.

And when at last the great shallow lake iced strong and thick,

all the town collected at its shore

to share weak soup and pickled herring 

and remember home.

 He would go down with the rest

on clear winter nights

and strap on the wooden skates

his grandpa whittled by summer campfires.

He would fling himself across the freeze

beyond the gravitational pull of neighbor and kin

Out past the far and fallow fields

Jumping half sunk fenceposts with their glinting tripwires--

Out towards the boundaries of his life

Out towards those trillion stars 

Pressed close and blazing

in their absolute black.

And finally, at the very limits of his strong thighs

his steaming breath

his pounding heart

he’d stop.

With miles of silver ice in front

And miles of silver ice behind,

He’d stop

at that frail boundary 

separating the mysterious and the familiar.

He’d look out at the horizon’s hard true line

black against white

Out where the clean blanket of snow

got ratty and complicated--

pocked and poked through with pinon and sage 

and juts of ragged stone--

Out where the great constellations 

danced their slow reel

and whispered in their own strange tongue.

And then he’d look back--

back at the tiny lights flickering on the far shore--

tires set burning on the ice

marking where the old Danes waltzed

and school kids raced and made their games.

Where his friends stole kisses in the private dark. 

And there he stood

quickened and spent and steaming

teetering on wooden blades

Feeling his own pulse pounding in his own palms

There at the centerpoint

at the exact heart 

of the great silvered silence.