Cartography of Thaw

The ice remembers every pressure that shaped it — boot heel, branch tip, the long argument of a river pressing from underneath.

By March the edges go first, a slow unlocking at the seams where two cold things once met and agreed to hold each other.

Water finds its old grammar again, the syllables it spoke before silence — running over the stone's dark vowels, saying what it always meant to say.

I stood at the bank and watched a sheet of it release, tip, and slide beneath the surface the way a thought, long frozen, finally moves through you and is gone.

What remains is the bed, patient and bare, its gravel turned to small coins of light. The thaw does not erase the winter. It only teaches you the river was there all along.