Heat of Snow

When she, laughing, plastered a snowball on me,
all the crisp, white, sherbety cold we both were
waiting for seemed suddenly to have melted; somehow her shoulders

fell against my own as the thing hit both of
us at once, and then as we fell together
on the high, soft drift that the sun made bright, we burned, O we burned, but

not because such sunlight was any warmer
than the glaring ice on the pond beyond us,
forcing us to squint as we sat and shivered later together

when we thought how even inside the snow there
blazed such warmth; how nothing was colder now than
our informing flame; and if ice perhaps might cool it a little,

then how painful, blinding, the prospect toward the
shimmering pond where, lifeless, the ice awaited
first our shielded gaze, then our tired march and final arrival.