THIN ICE

I remember the dark and narrow twist
of a mythic street in Florence
rounding the present
with artful haunts of time,
clutching at the edges
of elegiac felicity.

I look in the mirror now and say
"I am here"
and I am stolidly here;
did I ever walk or breathe
in that vivid Italian prism, lurching along,
searching for a fairy tale in which I could be
a princess, nacreous in the moon?

I'm here where the news anchor tells me
that the polar bears,in Antarctica, I think,
one of the poles,
are on thinning ice,
imperiled by the warming of their world.

And they not knowing.

The princess disappears
in glimpses of extinction, and the polar bears
are lost again in metaphor, there,
where they were,
cast in amber,
still forever.

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