The Boulder SCOTT STEVENS

The Boulder

Scott Stevens

The fishes’ fins twitch with resistance futile against the chill—like failed sailors finally finding the Northwest Passage, where they will die. They flap their bones so spindly they could poke through their own throats. Their scales are goth sequins they take too seriously, while their black eyes peer up through the porthole cut in ice that tonight will shrink to white.

Over this sheet of a river you bend down to them, boulder, with constant extension of your mineral hand. The fish will never splash out to reach it and attempt metamorphosis.

But you were a boy once, and you succeeded. Your belly rolls rest, magma-made but cool, and cooler now, having slipped into this winter sleep.

Teach me to change. Feed me the quartz glinting all over you, glitter of parties taking millennia to wash off and forget. I want to grow my own geodes, my own sharp purple secrets. I want to grow cold when the year demands it, not these constant comparisons of snow to blankets, the snuggly refusing of nature by metaphor.