Ice has its grammar and geometry,
its fugues and preludes and tonalities,
but in the latitudes of high humidity
where I was born,
the tongues of ice can never form,
its language can't materialise.
Instead, beneath heat-blasted skies
I dream of glacial domains
where creatures of the tropic zones
lack the genomes to survive.
Perversely I imagine blizzards,
gales that tower into spires,
knife-edged winds that spiral
about shelters huddled in like lice,
embedded in the chill, clean pelt
that clothes the continental shelf,
while all around, white desert howls
and whispers and claims sacrifice.
What are the registers and rhetoric
of frozen continents - of that one, still
so little known, alone of all its kind?
If we could comprehend the cries
and frequencies of great cetaceans,
they would reveal a vast arcana
translated from frozen tomes,
locked in domes and catacombs
more magical than Kubla Khan's,
in fathoms measureless to man
beneath a sunless sea…