CHRISTINE HUME lives in Denver, Colorado. The winner of the 1999 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, The New Republic and Boulevard. THEOLOGY OF COLD You must be a watcher and a rounder. You must be alert to drift. As an iceboat heads into glaciers, a slow blinking warning. You could map all the rivers slipping in. Steal water and thicken the white sky by realling sugar melting on a sidewalk. You might be a roof with many salts and birds. Because news comes by, you must turn your mind to outer space. As you tend the fire, begin to be wind-bleary. Your cur whimpers and twitches in its sleep and circles and there is no difference. You squint at self-collapsing incarnations thrown from windows. Slant the doubtful gray face going off. Look, you might have slumbered through the collapse of caribou. The ice age is a sleep, and there are no roads connecting it to other villages. Space may still be private because alone is busy everywhere at home, and privacy washes off the eye’s blaring caprice. But by the time you burn off daylight, your posture is hopeless; your house caught and leveled save a metal fan whistling and twisting the in-gust of flame-magnetisms and ash sent for wild be damned. No blades’ shadows play out large how the dog had run cold, how the sleepers walked; it could only be one thing turning the wrong way inside. NAVEL All the people would come to the middle that’s how vague the pleasures of games are newlyweds didn’t bargain on the sea’s hollow dark because they wanted sky and old people wanted them to see the place larks come from on her honeymoon my grandmother sketched her own head in a habit then smeared it into a beachball by the sea which is an end but it’s night in the song all the people rushing to one side of the boat only this time my grandmother overhears needles of conversation some called her gray when the city began to disappear around its waist the voices edged out camouflage made her seek flashlights the newlyweds began saying fuck every time comets have been heard in the endless going on they think everything her ears hear, a sea for swollen eyes a circle of chairs to circle the lip where my grandmother’s skirt billows breath-thin and dark as a fingerprint I know what won’t merge counts on stars like potential family but soon the speed of light makes no difference their whites had to be touched and the comet was it for an age what she never first of all wanted was lilt and lop still she doesn’t just take it inside the air full of roofs the way true middles never are after my grandmother stooped to leave, her hearing aid gave away snow that was when Alaska was the navel she stared at