Ice

 

 

Robert Strong Woodward

  

Ice

 

Her house is armed to the teeth. Icicles bristle

above my head as I shiver at her door.

One lackadaisical arrow drops.

She's locked in behind winter's 

glassy portcullis.

 

The river's a white road now. As I set foot it groans

as if under a hundred trundling cartwheels.

A crack zigzags across the surface

and I am plunged through the shell

into slush-water.

 

Oat-husks and thistles, a crop of frost in the snowfields.

There is a clear glue hardening on my walls,

clutching my fingertip like birdlime.

From now on nothing will move

but the skidding wind.

 

Matthew Francis

fr. The Green Month: Poems After Daffydd ap Gwilym 

 

He could've said, 

 "It was cold out, and an icicle nearly brained me while I was waiting for Alice to answer the door. The river is frozen although I went through in one spot and got my feet wet." 

He could've made the complaint, 

 "The damp on my walls is turned to ice now, and the wind never stops."

 And be true, accurate, even precise.

 

Instead, he gives us other facets of those same qualities. 

 

Instead, he chooses words which call up a sense of of old chivalry, of besieged castles, he gives us a glimpse of the possible story he (and we with him) is part of, or partaking of. 

He takes us on a walk, but notices that there are more paths than one. The landscape he lives in makes new ways out of itself - the river becomes a way.

And there are harvests to be gathered from what is not usually a source of food.

Weathers, landscapes, objects - all these have different facets when held up to the light, when examined, tasted, tried. All these are transfigured by the eye that sees their possibles, and that gives the possibles words. 

The poet is not "creating", he is revealing, he is showing the realities which are already there.

 

They are all there! 

Here!

 

 

 

 

Ice Wager

Johannes Franciscus Hoppenbrouwers

 The Ice Wager

Snowscape. Shod in tailor’s irons,
Red-hot, with my poundage of weights,
I test the ice of our latest year.
Half the world is out on skates

And the other half watches. Avercamp
Or Brueghel bring the wild duck
Out of the skies, and crowd the river
With yellow leggings, anoraks,

Tobogganing children, and those dogs
More loved around here than people—
The blind or the lonely. Winter trees
Turn gelid in the freezing fog,

The roads are churned to slushy meal
By the horses. Zigzags, figures of eight
Complete the picture. But it is real,
Our wager, so place your bet

With the notary on the bank,
Impartial witness. Hollow rumblings
Out on the ice—the iron quoits,
The games in progress. Will it crumble, 

Our little world, or will it hold?
Upriver from the Netherlands’
Oceangoing space, a man skates in,
A traveller, his clasped hands

Behind his back, his earflaps
Dangling. Has it fallen through,
Our worldview? But he brings no news.
Our mulled wine, our potato schnapps

Are all that concern him. Hurdy-gurdies,
Monkey dances. The Good, the True
Are beyond him, where he is travelling to.
It is down, again, to me and you,

Tonight, when I come off the ice
Which, needless to say, has never cracked
In centuries of changing skies,
To carry out the mandatory acts,

Traditional, for the time of year—
Banquets where the loser pays,
White tablecloths for the ice-floes
Junketing on, in hope and fear.

Harry Clifton 

The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 

 

Has the ice cracked? 

Has our worldview collapsed? 

Will our little world crumble?

I love the questions. Are we ready to make a wager on our answers?

 

 

Under the Ice

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Under the Ice

Like Coleridge, I waltz

on ice. And watch my shadow 

on the water below. Knowing that

if the ice were not there

I'd drown. Half willing it.

In my cord jacket

and neat cravat, I keep

returning to the one spot.

How long, to cut

a perfect circle out?

Something in me

rejects the notion.

The arc is never complete.

My figures-of-eight

almost, not quite, meet.

Was Raeburn's skating parson

a man of God, poised

impeccably on the brink;

or his bland stare

no more than a decorous front?

If I could keep my cool

like that. Gazing straight ahead,

not at my feet. Giving

no sign of knowing

how deep the water, how thin the ice.

Behind that, the other

question: whether the real you

pirouettes in space

or beckons from under the ice

for me to come through.

Stewart Conn

Similar to my post of December 14, 2016 (The Midnight Skaters by Edmund Blunden), this skater is also acutely aware of how close Death is. He almost courts it - except he can't quite, he's a little too nervous, too superstitious perhaps. He wants to be more "cool", like the skating parson in the painting by Raeburn, but he's not sure that guy isn't posing, pretending not to care about the risks he's taking. The last stanza is the one that clinches it. He's not even sure if he's himself, or if the shadow skating on the other side of the ice is him. Is life is that precarious, that uncertain - it may end abruptly and without us knowing if we're even truly ourselves? God forbid. But what a wonderful way to pose the question.

  

 

Year's End

Maurice Langaskens, "A Village Covered in Snow"

Year’s End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Richard Wilbur 

This sense of not having quite finished all the things we needed to do, of not being quite prepared to face the next thing, of the thing being set before we were finished - it's all too familiar. More time! More time! 


 

Lake Harvest

Holly Meade

Lake Harvest

Down on the flat of the lake

Out on the slate and the green,

Spotting the border of Erie's sleeping robe of silver-blue changeable silk,

In sight of the shimmer of silver-blue changeable silk,

In the sun,

The men are sawing the frosted crystal.

Patient the horses look on from their sleighs,

Patient the trees, down from the bank, darkly ignoring the sun.

Each saw sings and whines in a grey-mittened hand,

And diamonds and pieces of a hundred rainbows are strewn around.

Raymond Knister

Absolutely beautiful description. Real life is poetry when translated by someone like Knister. Poets have my respect for this reason - we need help to see beauty - sometimes poems are our only alchemy.