Warmth Where It's Coldest

Lyrics

I found it on Peter I Øy.
A square of color against black volcanic ash, under a sky like milk.

They call you Warm Willie, back in Newfoundland.
I see your hands on the ropes, calloused raw.
On the docks that smell of creosote and salt spray.
You lasso mountains of ancient ice, blue-veined giants that calve and boom like cannons in the fog.
Your life is moving the cold from where it is, to where it won't do harm.

But this is all warmth.
Her heavy wool work shirt, with the careful patch at the elbow.
His blue flannel from Saturday mornings in 1993.
Every stitch a story your rough hands knew by heart.
A life measured in familiar fabrics, sewn against a long, final winter.

So why bring it here, Willie?
All the way to the Bellingshausen Sea, where the wind scours the world to the bone.
You left a memory-quilt on a shore that holds no life.
A bed for no one.
Did you think the ice could keep it safe?
Does warmth survive where it's coldest?

You sailed south for weeks.
Past the last of the birds, past the last vagrant seal.
To an island so lonely even the penguins refuse it.
Did you unroll it with frozen fingers, smooth it on the ground?
A final blanket in a world made of ice.
A last word given to the absolute silence.

The sound of a berg breaking off the coast of home, that deep groan and crack.
It must have echoed here, in the quietest place on Earth.
You tow the great, dangerous, cold things.
But this small warm thing... you brought it to the heart of the cold itself.
To see if a thing can just be what it is, forever.

A memory-quilt.
On Peter I Island.
A single patch of blue flannel...
a stubborn fleck of color against the snow.
Can it survive?