You will be out of reach upon a wafer shelf of ice,

crabbing through dreams with bent knees, while

the ice snaps and smokes like a fragile simile.
But this has not happened yet. You sit with me, sketching

out your plans back in Queensland’s provincial steamy pubs,

where glass is a verb to cold-eyed drunks sour with beer,
and ice grants visions. Veiny addicts become supermen,

fracturing their way through emergency wards, throwing

chairs through the looking glass, following Alice into the frost.
You once told me of the hapless kid who kicked in the church glass door

for the collection money, so that the priest had to save him

with his vestments: forever thinking of stained glass as arterial red.
In a pub near the Brisbane River viscid and luminous at dusk’s edge

the water levels to a stretch of glass for the eight men who

slip their rowing boat through its cartesian warps.
We watch them lean back on the extraction, their arms

pendulum and piston, languid on the extensions, rapid

lunges, their reflection lagging out upon a sheer of glass.
I’ve seen you daydream through a store window at blue pup icebergs

and giant’s fists hunkering in the flat bays of a travel agent’s poster

as the Northern Lights flash green and turquoise above them.
But the auroras are spectral slivers and shards of a star’s breath

and too cold for me. The sea’s floating junk is a brittle wish

and all too chill. You will climb that mountain alone to the top.
The stars will be your cold witnesses, frigid and distant as

chipped nodules pressed into the galaxy’s sore. Always icy

though each one is hotter than the first blood ever spilled.
The stars are too far away to be reached with apologies,

so we can describe them how we wish. The plummy

metaphor of glass: paste costume jewellery slung over space.
Similes for ice. Under the empty gaze of the shivering stars and

the shadow of the last peak swollen thick at the base, you think

of only one thing when you step out on each bare shelf of ice.
Sometimes it is warm enough for the sheeted ice to melt,

for the crevasse to give up the bodies it has chinked away,

but in this late freeze you walk across your mirror.
The mountain offers you a frozen scattering of light

that was water, a refraction eating away at this last hard climb.

A slick of glass. You skitter on the bound glissading wave.
It has not happened yet. It may never happen.  These auguries

soap and fumble from the metaphor. A cold vision captured:

you step out under the heedless stars, the future slippery as glass.