Crash!

And if darkness could sound, it would sound like this giant

waking up in the torture house, trying to die

and not dying, and trying

not to cry and immediately crying

that he will, that he will, that he will do his best

to adjust his dark soul to the pressing request

of the only true frost,

and he pants and he gasps and he rasps and he wheezes:

ice is the solid form when the water freezes;

a volatile liquid (see "Refrigerating")

is permitted to pass into evaporating

coils, where it boils,

which somehow seems wrong,

and I wonder how long

it will rumble and shudder and crackle and pound;

Scudder, the Alpinist, slipped and was found

half a century later preserved in blue ice

with his bride and two guides and a dead edelweiss;

a German has proved that the snowflakes we see

are the germ cells of stars and the sea life to be;

hold

the line, hold the line, lest its tale be untold;

let it amble along through the thumping pain

and horror of dichlordisomethingmethane,

a trembling white heart with the frost froth upon it,

Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that B in her bonnet,

stunned bees in the bonnets of cars on hot roads,

Keep it Kold, says a poster in passing, and lo,

loads,

of bright fruit, and a ham, and some chocolate cream,

and three bottles of milk, all contained in the gleam

of that wide-open white

god, the pride and delight

of starry-eyed couples in dream kitchenettes,

and it groans and it drones and it toils and it sweats--

Shakelton, pemmican, penguin, Poe's Pym--

collapsing at last in the criminal

night.