Phoenix of the Glacier

begins where cold ended
where vast crests of ice

came to die
and dropped their stony load,
now covered with soil
a rocky cairn for times long gone.
A battered farmhouse sits on the hill
paint peels and broken windows gape.
Its decomposing carcass
where my childhood came to die.
A skeleton stripped of meaning,
a splintering wooden fossil
buried by time so shallow yet so viscous
it is now innocent in its post-senescence.

I am not.

I am a dirty phoenix,
the frost of the glaciers reborn.
The iceberg's gravel armors me
as tender skin could not
proof against the feverish, sweaty hands
of a ghost whose corpse has yet to die,
proof against his stifling weight
atop my childish form
which is nothing
compared to lying beneath ice
that endured for fifty thousand years or more.
If I could live a thousand lifetimes
perhaps the ice I have become might melt,
leaving only the strength of stones