Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To
the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Ezra Pound
1.
Is it antimetaphor to say that truth is cold?
What is the
opposite of absolute zero?
When cold leaves
lair into summer air
do butterflies
fall like razor blades?
Ruthless in its
ancient cave,
never seeing
sunlight, craving.
And what of
desire?
Is it infinite
heat waiting
to be devoured by
truth?
2.
Snow—xue:
雪
falling,
whitening, making ghosts
of
land and water.
3.
Are absolutes
truly opposite and jointly apposite
of another there?
Is the teleology
of matter by matter formed?
Is lack of
appetition appetition's eyes?
Comes the Ice Age.
Waters rise. Wooly Mammoth hypnotizes
geneticists to
resurrect its form.
The cold burns
across the planet dancing with invisible warm.
4.
On the tundra a
million years ahead
an encampment of
hunters
following game
across the plain.
Numbered among the
domes
the heavy-boned
tabernacle
of the man who
sells letters.
“Anyone
to trade venison
for an 'S'?” he
sings, “to engrave
a hiss upon the
dart and speed it
to its prey ?”
5.
He keeps the
campfire.
He fashions
arrowheads and torches.
He strings bows
and notches
arrows.
He paints with
animal fat
and ocher.
He counts winter
(there is only one
season
and only he can
count).
The lady of the
hut
comes and goes
looking
for the misplaced
tooth
and leg he lost to
a Siberian tiger.
She plays the bone
flute.
She is expert in
poisons.
See his hands.
See his forearms.
See his fingers
and nails.
In daydream he
invents the wheel
but reasons there
are no roads
to roll it on nor
a beast to pull it.
He looks at the
missus.
“Anyone
to trade for a Capital 'I'?”,
he sighs, “Use
it to comb hair.”
Her eyes burn like
a flint blade.
He
settles for dogs and a hupak'in
from which arises sleigh.
6.
As ambiguity is the unspoken figure,
wheel-less and wily,
as lust flows in waves across poems,
so is ground the third term:
snow melts, mares are delivered of
colts,
and the travois fills with children.
E. A. Costa 28 April, 2015 San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua
