Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day
To Mary Jo Salter
Beyond the ice-bound stones and bucking trees, past bewildered Mary, the Meer in snow, two skating rinks and two black crooked paths are a battered pair of reading glasses scratched by the skater’s multiplying math. Beset, I play this game of tic-tac-toe. Divide, subtract. Who can tell if love surpasses? Two naughts we’ve learned make one astonished 0— a hectic night of goats and compasses. Folly tells the truth by what it’s not— one X equals a fall I’d not forgo. Are ice and fire the integers we’ve got? Skating backwards tells another story— the risky star above the freezing town, a way to walk on water and not drown.
Credit
Excerpted from The Watercourse by Cynthia Zarin. Copyright © 2002 by Cynthia Zarin. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.
Author
Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of five previous collections of poems, including Next Day (Knopf, 2024); Orbit (Knopf, 2017); and The Ada Poems (Knopf, 2010). She is also the author of a novel, Inverno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), two books of essays, Two Cities (David Zwirner Books, 2020) and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (Knopf, 2013), and several books for children.
Date Published
01/01/2002