Icebergs (Part I)

1.  Two Icebergs

Promises at dawn
Amount to nothing, at twilight.

She waits, she does
through sluggish afternoon, air conditioning
traffic crawling below
And worse,
Doom and Fate and Old:
the terror of
drying up before her time

It seems to her that always
he is spent by the day,
Programmed for the ground
Dashed, torn upon the curb
an accident victim

The accident of his Life
Just confounds him

She waits, she does.

But just so
Sound replaces light
Motion replaces reason
Lust replaces motivation
Frost replaces feeling

*****

2. The Frost

He is Sent out On an iceberg
Into the wide North Sea

No spear,
No fur
An expedition of one

In the towers
of the Trees
Crawling on bloody knees
he gathers the earth
in slabs of clay

Around his mud-streaked body
night falls
wind howls through corridors of fir
Snowladen and Black

A little further North
North seems right

*******

3. Suites

Credit goes to the crazy ones
Checking in, Checking out
Of their private hotel suites

She is one of those now

From the plastic pink deck chair
from the hotel’s penthouse
suddenly she knows the shape of this skyline

They all slide back, the details
like a row of dusty books removed from a shelf
then shoved back in all at once

A suite of Useless memories
that may as well be lies

His bed was over here, And over here the closet

Where above the suits and ties,
sat old primary school shoes
And a flimsy diorama he had made as a child, of the solar system

Often she stared at the diorama in the early morning beside him
And wondered how they two had happened to collide
in all the billions of miles of Space.

She couldn’t say now if in that whole of that solar system
he still  existed anywhere

The solar system of faded crepe paper and cardboard
smeared with Elmer’s paste
Yellowed, decade-hardened;

She wonders where it is
She wishes she had kept it.