You, Burning

I catch you in a half-dream in between waking and dying. Grim and grinning: metallic flash, spectral. Lordly as the sun with your greatcoat and epaulettes and heavy compass. Your nose blade-sharp, profile cruel as a knife, your mouth a slit like the lines carved in your face —all knife, all ice— and yet more ice, miles of it on the horizon, blank lines tilting punch-drunk towards the vanishing point, gone in a parhelion. Gold lanterns rattling on the wall. Gold buttons falling off your uniform. Blood creased across your hairline, blood on your hands your gloves your ruined uniform, your eyes rolling red in watery sockets, your body unlacing and coming apart from the inside, and you, delirious, burning, burning at the frozen edge of the earth.