The Frozen River

Summary

In this dream, the river is frozen,

it is not a river, perhaps, but a glacier

reaching to the horizon –

I mean this: that the river, or glacier, lifts

skyward and appears to disappear

or meet the air. Is this what matters?

Or that under my feet the frozen rifts

and ridges – the small hard waves

that are like skiffs of royal icing

on a Christmas cake – have started

to thaw so that I must pick my way

cautiously, judiciously, like a bear

(a Polar Bear) finding its paws

in the soggy melt where they should

have met the compact fluff and crisp

of snow on ice. But I digress. Somehow

people have been driving their cars

on the river leaving slushy tracks; this is

reassuring and disconcerting. The ice

can take my weight, I must only pick

carefully around the pools that are now

forming near the centre, where the river

threatens to collapse inwards towards

the dark eel of river freeing itself

beneath me in slow humps and lurches.

The river is in a faraway country where

the vendor of hot drinks and donuts parked

precariously at the river's edge politely bends

his tongue around my language andI've

never felt so at home as here, among

the cars and day-trippers and polar bears.

This is not an environmental poem, this

is nothing more than a dream poem; this may

not even be a poem. I ponder for a while

after waking whether I am missing

something. Suppose that however much

we ply the surface, worry the depths, pore

over the detail, there is always only ever

ahead of us the gravity-defying

sky-reach of the river/glacier, at once

suspended, at once inexorably moving

towards a horizon we will never touch.