I wear the frost of a thousand sleeps.

My breath is the blizzard that never sleeps.

I remember the sun when it was weak and young,

a pup that whimpered at the edge of my tongue.

My paws are maps of forgotten ground.

My voice is the sound the mountain makes when it breaks its bone.

I have eaten the dark at the world's core,

and dug my dreams from the permafrost's store.

The little shaman came, a flickering thing,

all rattles and stings and a desperate sing.

His flint was a thorn. His fire, a lie.

I let him look in my glacier eye.

He crawled inside the cave of my roar.

He walked the halls of my sacred war.

He felt the grind of my mammoth-gnawed grief,

the weight of the ice, the unbelief

in a world of green. He trembled there,

a mouse in the belly of a stone bear.

I did not crush him. I gave him the cold

truth of my blood, a story untold

to his kind. I showed him the slow, great ache

of dominion, for the tundra's sake.

I let him feel my solitude, vast as the sky,

and the coming warmth in which I must die.

He fled, of course. A smaller thing now.

He carries my ghost in his sweating brow.

When he chants for the hunt, it is my voice they hear.

When he dances, it is my weight that trembles the sphere.

I am the cave. The last, the true.

The ice melts. The next world… will wear my hue.