Charlotte Otten

ICE-SKATING: ON SEEING AVERCAMP’S WINTER LANDSCAPE NEAR A VILLAGE

They’re skating on 400-year-old ice
On the canal where my mother almost drowned,
Wearing the skates
My grandfather made,
Steel rudders
Wooden frames
That cracked, splintered,
Came apart on their feet.

Avercamp’s Lovers skate in pairs
Guarding their love
In the thick gloves of hands
Knitted to each other,
Skate around crows
And a dog feeding on
A dead frozen horse.

Grandpa skated
Six canals in one day
Where in the glow of the dark
A chorus sang his triumphs
Warmed him with a cup of heetchocolade
I can hear the smack of his lips
As he pushes tomorrow out of his mind.

I reach into the painting.
Where 400-year-old ice
Outlasts thousands of thaws
And the mute painter speaks.

Grandpa’s dead but he skates
On his splintered skates in the basement,
I wonder if he skated in Avercamp’s village
Met its Lovers
And a dead horse frozen and stripped
By crows and a dog.

Charlotte F. Otten's poems have appeared in journals as diverse as Agenda (UK), Southern Humanities Review, Poems from Aberystwyth, The Healing Muse, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She is best known for her book, "A Lycanthropy Reader."