Reflections of Morning

No, the sky was not so gray
as it was now, I glimpsed the sun
rising in the dawn, glimpsed it the way
an archeologist would glimpse the first sight
of Atlantis.
It has been snowing since 6am this morning,
and I woke up, shivering, in the dark.
Sweat glistened on my forehead and back,
it hardened into ice. I looked
like the Iceman Cometh, just before
he left for his long trip to Antarctica,
where the other iceman lived and thrived.
I wondered if the icemen had icewomen
or icedogs, wondered if there was an ice family.
It’s something to think about, you know,
just something to think about.
I had never met an iceman myself,
since I was from Cuba, I can’t survive
in the cold, I can’t live without a parka.
I turn the thermostat way up high, past seventy,
but the bill does not matter, I’m shivering
so much it hurts. The sun is out; it is not so gray;
but it is cold, and I rise out of my bed and plod
over to the shower, turn on the hot water and strip
myself naked, look at my body in the
bathroom mirror. The mirror is fogging up.
I think again of the iceman, and how maybe
they did not have mirrors in Antarctica,
maybe they looked at themselves in a sheet of
floating ice, and were never cold because
they wore furs.