The Icehouse

I came through sun
to touch the icehouse door,
the lintel framed in majesty
of shadow, the threshold beam
so deep it shook my heart.

I felt the branding iron of mountain light
glide from my back; I stood
in the blue-fountained shadow of a world.

Now, vaguely powerful monoliths
swathed in the sleep of sawdust time;
now, rhyming blocks of Grecian stone
frozen in habitudes of dream,
free me of the familiar’s heat and blindness; let me
kneel upon the cold of all the rivered unpossessed:

the crested pillars of that Roman doom
long rooming now in crumbled underworlds:
the petals of Egyptian flowers
bowered in Everests of stone, in chill
of lips seduced to artifice,
the ice wherein the mastadons of fury fell
all fully armed, and wrapped in mystic valor.

Now pallor of light
at high, dim window, ancient beams,
the clear and aching violet of shadow.

The sun, the sun is gone! Alone
in cold I kneel, secure; and fail, and fall,
and stand to gaze
on seas of Vikings and Balboa, over deeps
beneath the last subliminal, beyond
the town’s last fence and faltering, grassy rise.

O ice! O clothed in particles of wood
bled out of time,
your timeless is my mood,
your unfamiliar all my recognition and companionship.