ICE

ICE

ICE

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a block of ice:
the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures, facets;
dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly complicate the cosmos of its innards.
Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a treasure horde of light,
when you stab it with the awl again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both faces sadly grainy, gnawed at, dull.

What was called an ice-house was a dark, low place, of raw, unpainted wood,
always black with melted ice or ice as yet ungelled;
there was saw-dust, and saw-dust’s tantalizing, half-sweet odor, which, so cold, seemed to pierce directly to the brain.
You'd step onto a low-roofed porch, someone would materialize,
take up great tongs and with precise, placating movements like a lion-tamer’s slide an ice block from its row.

Take the awl again yourself now, thrust, and when the block splits do it yet again, again;
watch it disassemble into smaller fragments, crystal after fissured crystal.
Or if not the puncturing blade, try to make a metaphor, like Kafka’s frozen sea within:
take into your arms the cake of actual ice, make a figure of its ponderous inertness,
of the way its quickly wetting chill against your breast would frighten you and make you let it drop.

Imagine then how even if it shattered and began to liquefy,
the hope would still remain that if you acted quickly, gathering up the slithery, perversely skittish ovals,
they might be refrozen and the mass reconstituted, with precious little of its brilliance lost, 
just this lucent shimmer on the rough, raised grain of water-rotten floor,
just this drop as sweet and warm as blood evaporating on your tongue.