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Sport 41: 2013
Jo Morris — The Offerings of Ice
Jo Morris
The Offerings of Ice
Stockholm in spring.
The tour guide describes the sea in winter
transformed into fragile solidity:
boats stuck fast, cracks underfoot.
Under a bridge fusing two island city-parts,
he points to a bony outcrop of rock,
as though the sea bed has hunched a shoulder.
A man lived there, and his mother
walked the bridge
once a week in the frozen season
to lower a rope, at its end a basket
a gullet for her son to peck at.
I imagine her feet
tracking last year’s steps in the snow,
the hurting air,
the wool breath-wet around her mouth.
In Gamla Stan and Sodermalm
babies are unwrapped from their snowsuits,
coats hung like caught clouds,
children suck pearl sugar from their kannelbullar,
but she is alone and cold, afraid she will find
he has walked to the ice and fallen
through it
into the empty silence
he’s been searching for since he
turned from her kiss at four,
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walked from her house at fourteen.
How she strains, listening for his voice-thread
rising along the line of rope:
‘Jag är fortfarande här.’
But he knows the rope is her lifeline
and refuses the offer of the ice
that creeps to his door, pausing only
for the brief midday sun.
She wishes she could slide down,
heat rice and fiskbullar on his little stove,
share his fire, before
clawing back up the rope to the bridge
and hauling over the rail, to blow on her frozen fingers.
No one is there to watch her stop-footed progress
once the line goes slack. She leaves her son
in his house of sticks, and fades
into the city’s cold stories.