Aquifer

sabbath

Here it is, winter, and familiar sidewalks
are unfamiliar, are puckered with cold,
buckling and tripping up your boot heels.
This ice that possesses concrete
has seeped up from the aquifer, they say,
through soil through clay
through unmapped bedrock.

Swim down, swim into it, half-frozen
and blind in the dark. Here you will find it,
the armies of water that amass in their subterranean caves,
that follow unseen veins up to the sidewalks
and push up the bricks with the frost.
They say there is water underground, they say this
but you want to see it: the roots of buried ice
that clutch winter roads and crack them
as easily as ice shatters the brittle,
enfolded tree limbs. Winter does not sleep.
You have seen it, how water breaks earth,
reaps breakage from the earth, an unseen insurgence,
a blind thing made wild, made king.