Dauer

I am a worm in 

winter.  Inside–sickly-

sweet sap for blood. It’s 

embalming fluid, it shuts me 

down.

My voice is brittle, my

hair is brittle, I am 

prone to cracking.  

Fragility is damned and

beautiful.  I speak my

brittle voice as if

from behind a layer of 

glassine, or glass.  

My heart pumps 

slow and heavily,

driving the winter 

sap through my body.

 Something

heavy lies resigned in

my veins.  

    On the window-

panes, chrystals waltz

slowly, accumulating

stasis.  I am the inside of a 

cell in a whale’s blubber.  I am 

someplace so deep in the

ocean that light has to 

work to get there.

I shiver, ice  is in my bones, slowing

time for me.  I can see through the 

amber on my coffin, and I am fighting the

encroaching chill.

There are songs that 

come from within ice,

there are long seasons

that sing to the body, that

wrap it tight, like pagan 

gods.  

My new residence is

   Chronos’ coffin, 

wrapped in capillaries

of frost.

    Ice gods have

no mercy, their fragility

is an infection, diffusing 

outward from the axis mundi.

More brittle than angry,

their Midas touch turns

flesh to glass and 

tin, turns irises purple-

grey.  The silver in 

me reacts to light, 

needs to be washed and 

affixed, angrily begging to be

burned in acid.

Freezing a thing preserves it, at the

cost of life.  A photograph needs a

victim.  A taxidermied bear loses its

grandeur, becomes harmless.  I lose

my energy, one electron at a time.  Memories

calcify.

    Enduring is a

function of metabolism.

An infant or a humming-

bird thrum a spring

music with their 

hearts and wings.  

I sing icebergs

creaking, my vision 

fogged like frosted

glass.

(Dauer, German for “enduring”, is a hypometabolic state found in some animals such as nematodes.  Robert Naviaux, an expert in mitochondrial and metabolic diseases, found strong similarities between ME/CFS patients and animals in dauer. Info here: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/37/E5472 )