Words for Snow

“It’s a myth, you know, that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow,”
you mentioned as we played in it, making angels with childish abandon,
“Why would they need hundreds of words when a few will do?”
Pensive, you were distracted by snowflakes settling on your frost-rimmed lashes.
“It doesn't make sense.  I’m not even sure who came up with that old story.
Some old-school anthropologist who was either very stupid or very bored.”

I laughed then.  Later I sat through anthropology classes I found boring,
easily distracted during lectures by visions you playing in that snow.
That entire first semester I dreamt of it, of you, embroidering the story
so that your leaving had meaning.  I had been abandoned
to the vagaries of your whims.  But you were my idol.  I was lashed
like an ox to your visions of what the world could do,

and beaten down by the tyranny of what it actually does.
Only your words remained.  I drilled them into myself, boring
through my brain to root out my bourgeois notions, lashing
out against the intransigent parts of me still foolishly snowed
by the petty conceits of monogamy and fidelity.  I abandoned
those morals for yours.  Your ideas, like the embellished stories

my father told a younger me, rang false.  But who was I to demand a story
where after the boy meets girl he forsakes all others, like lovers do,
to live happily ever after.  You wanted us to cavort with wild abandon.
“What a pedestrian tale,” you said, “we are different.  What a bore.
How constraining, and not for us,” using hundreds of words for snow
to blind me to the lies you delivered with dry-eyed tear-stained lashes.

Anthropology was the punishment.  I saw in it the delicious lash
of irony.  It was a way to endure the pain of having swallowed your stories
with unbridled naïveté despite the evidence, seeing only the pristine snow
and not what it covered.  I suffered from your absence for as long as I did
because I thought you were more, when truth was you were a bore,
having seduced a waif like me as a crutch for your issues with abandonment.

You sought the pleasure of walking away, of doing the abandoning –
my reverence both a balm to wounded pride and a method of lashing
out at the lover who left you.  She told me you drove her away, bored
and immune to your histrionics, with neediness.  I believed her story,
when all was said and done.  Stupid to take revenge on her by doing
the same onto me.  That was the semester I learned an Eskimo word for snow,

kaniktshartluk.  Bad snow.  We played in that snow.  There you abandoned me. 
You did not live up to the promise of those frost-rimmed lashes. 
I changed the story, bored with waiting for an improbable change. I stayed left.