The Ice Hotel

By RICHARD MICHELSON

I love you, I say, after the quarrel but before
falling asleep. And within that small victory
I can feel my chest muscles tightening,
as my breath rises before me like a cartoon cloud
awaiting the articulation of the storm.

There is, my wife reminds me, a single degree
where even ice, water and vapor can coexist;
but I’m already shivering, doubting
all in this world I have taken on faith;
snow’s comforting white hexagonal symmetry,

for example, which the silver sliver of moonlight
is just now illuminating. Here at the Ice Hotel,
outside Quebec City, let us praise the grand
pavilion with its chandeliers carved from ice,
and its exquisite ice chairs, and its walls glazed

with prehistoric frost paintings. Let us celebrate
even our eight hours in traffic, cold shoulder
to shoulder, our emergency medical cooler bodies
transporting their arctic hearts. Here at the Ice Hotel
let us honor the two young honeymooners,

clinking cubes in crystalline glasses,
who offered to share this last room—
their reservation, our money— with its fleece sheets
and deer pelts piled high on solid blocks of ice.
How many words have the Inuit for love?

the bride asks, smiling over at us, her skin luminescent
like the moon, his bronzed as raw honey. My wife
draws me near. I can hear her heart beating.
All around us the atmosphere is also heating up
and even the polar caps are, as I feign sleep, thawing.

Richard Michelson‘s latest collection is More Money Than God. He owns R. Michelson Galleries and is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

[Purchase your copy of Issue 09 here.]

The Ice Hotel

Related Posts

The parthenon in Nashville

March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

MATT DONOVAN
On my flight to Nashville, after / telling me the Parthenon in his town was far better / than the one in Greece, the guy seated beside me / in the exit row swore that Athena was an absolute / can’t-miss must-see. Her eyes will see into your soul, / he said, no goddamn joke.

picture of a bible opened up

February 2024 Poetry Feature

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON
There was tear gas deployed without a tear. There were / rubber bullets fired from weapons that also fire lethal rounds. There were / armored vehicles steering through the streets of the capital that stars our maps. // What we saw was only new to the people it was new to.

Headshot of Anne Pierson Wiese

Sharp Shadows

ANNE PIERSON WIESE
On our kitchen wall at a certain time / of year appeared what we called the sharp / shadows. / A slant of western light found / its way through the brown moult of fire / escape hanging on to our Brooklyn rental / building for dear life and etched replicas / of everything