Adam Day

Shared Breath

                  After Raul Zurita

And like frozen hulls
our mouths appear

beneath icebergs
which float over the night

looking like strangled cloths;
the breath of our mouths

and those frozen exhalations
at sea amid frosted breakers.

The icebergs detach
and we are set loose,

gazing at the glaciers of the night.
And the frozen unknown

Charcoal sky above revealed
the coast of a country

of snow covering the blue
membrane of the mountains,

and the sea still a blizzard
bordering the long beach

of meager love; the unknown
calling to us in which we must

look like children now,
returning the bluish gaze

as if in a trance, as if finally
a square hatchway revealed

a piece of welcome sky
bruised purple by the down,

and the frosted hills of the waves.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books). He is also the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Fence, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.