Lovers by the ice-age tarn
locked within the season’s frame tender
to the ancient sun
all their urgent naked claim:

‘Until the climate takes my eyes,
sun is darkened with its spores,
and pre-historic butterflies
turn to brittle amber tears,

bend me by the golden ice,
tip me to reflected stars;
here where winter’s snowy lace,
Venus whitened, red with Mars,

cusps the cuddled frozen eye
grip me like infinity.’
He, curled above her effortlessly
melts upon the purity.

‘Where the snow-thrilled continent,
all its queuing blinded hills,
skips the white hare to its heart
flashes burning icicles,

glacier-prisoned, iced in light,
I instance the blue weight,
valley-pinioned, through the least
curvings of landscape burst.’

Held in untemperatured January,
their ages warming embryo,
the two are liquid eye to eye:
one is tarn and one is sky.