Sunday, November 6, 2011

EREBUS: 77.32S; 167.09E






- for a friend who plans to spend a year in Antarctica

The jetsam of life is so easily erased –
terror covered by one short fall of snow.
We know that only a minor error
in the plan and not man
scattered the wreckage so.

I’ll spend a year reviewing
what fate and life have been doing,
uncovering from the ice the
ill-fitting pieces,
seeking the lost places,
replaying the tapes,
the programs, paths through time and space,
going beyond the last frontier if need be,
facing the fear of a white world
without faces, without trees,
reciting the rhyme and dissecting
the algebraic form of the silence,
the singing of aurorean fires until
I unravel from their contrapuntal patterns
of light messages that rank in glory
with those sung by Bach’s choirs.




This may explain it all.
I’ll fight to see if I am strong enough.
I’ll stake my life, use whalers’ pitch
soft from my hand-blood’s heat,
cut planks from an ancient frozen tree,
roughened wood from recent wrecks
and fashion them and lash them
together to make a small boat
that I hope eventually
will bring me back.



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