White on White by George Amabile (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

W H I T E O N W H I T E


Contents


Freeze
Snowfall: Four Variations
Seasonal
From a Journal
December 31st
White on White
Landscape with Snow
Solstice
Before, and After
Seeing Her
The Eclipse
Blame
Apple Wine
A Patch of Light
The Ice Thing
Hearth
Zen and the Art of Cross Country Skiing


FREEZE


Across the sky, ragged and swift,
an exodus of dream-stuff:
shadows, white peaks, blossoms, wisps
and rare islands of blue
where the stranded early morning moon
will flare before it dissolves
into smoke.

I stand in the blowing dawn
breathless, cold
unable to turn away.
It comes on like a spell
of misery. Mist
swarming the houses and bare trees.

By noon, branches rattle
their glass antlers at the sun.
There's a glittering skin
on the statues, the streets
are varnished, the government
buildings locked in a bright daze.

Before this, I was lazy.
Now I walk for miles, thinking
to whom do we owe the favor of such armor?
Even the churches wear stiff coats and glare.


SNOWFALL: FOUR VARIATIONS


Basic White

Angels
might fall that way
out of their myth-
ical, bloodless war
into the dark
street's electric light.

Stilled syllables
flakes
locked in the dead heat
of that debate
steer a dazed, formal dance
through cold halos.


The Shadows

Driving straight roads
at night, I flinch
inside as the blurred arrows
die into the windshield:
white poisonous thoughts:
tracer bullets from the last war.

No. This is a delicate
invasion. Drops
that have grown so cold
they flower cling
to the blind shapes of this world.


Station Break

In the dark bedroom
a girl shrugs off
her mohair sweater.

What is this shocked
blue crackling
if not some abstract god
who cares, desperately
for the shape
of her human shoulders?


Static.
A cold fact.


News of the World

The snow is cold, factual, a mind
battering static that proliferates
at windows and litters my T. V. screen
with dandruff, heroin
flaked ash from the ovens of the Third Reich...

Angels.
Pale Barbarians.
This is the white plague.
Sugary insect faces
continue to fall
into the eyes of lit cities
out of the dark ages of the sky.


SEASONAL


All afternoon the snowflakes whirl and fall.
In the park, skaters glide on the scraped mirror
of the duck pond. They are entranced by winter
like figurines trapped in a glass ball.

It’s a Christmas card, an iconography
of good cheer that returns each year from a past
we’d like to believe still has the power to cast
a breathless charm against catastrophe.

Those who watch from the road are reassured
by the calm skill, the clean redundancy
of scarves in the wind, blades that carve and coast
always in circles, closed as the stone outpost
where dead men dreamed, in the nation’s infancy,
that every ill we suffer had been cured.


FROM A JOURNAL


I'd been off by myself trying to evolve.
It had to be done
in the dark
under tight security.

I chose this northern lake
the auroras turning at night like lucid scarves
the afternoons of lime-green snow.

I remember the taste of fish eggs
on rice in sub-zero weather
the smell of cold fur
firelight and slow frost
given the run of the cabin
and the wolves
who were starving in their deep twilights.

Once I saw
(or was it merely hunger)
the blooming of nebulae
radiant colours
the sudden coherence like a sun
haze burning off
then a star cluster
and a pinwheel of dust
six billion miles from rim to rim.

And that was all.
Though the mind was willing
the body thinned
out like breath in a blizzard.
By the time they found me I was a changed man.


DECEMBER THIRTY-FIRST


Sign of the Goat. The closed Male will.
Once

again it’s time to make ourselves important
promises

before we begin to celebrate the end
of a year

that was nothing like the year we predicted the year
before

lurching from terror to criminal war to natural
disaster.

I stand at the window and watch
the light

of another wasted day fade from the clouds,
from the streets.

Along the perimeter highway, traffic
backs up,

a necklace of plastic rubies and zircon brights.
For hours

it ties up the city
in a choke-hold of starts and blinks.


White on White


Snow blowing and drifting
beyond the double-glazed patio doors,
the starched carnation, leaning
from a ceramic eggshell
vase over creased linen, the thin
skin of a cigarette and the chains
of foam in a drained beer glass echo
the shock of my beard, my shirt, the hair
on my wrist, and I remember Summer,
a rush of angel wings from the outboard,
the swerve and flash of a fish,
little puffs like phosphate meringue
on the lake top near shore.

In Asia it's the colour of death.
Here it announces purity
in a bridal veil, a hospital gown
or celebrates the belief
that everything begins again
every day, false
dawn a clean page or a blank
check, open to forecasts
and signatures which are valid
only till sunset
burns down to a flurry of moths.


LANDSCAPE WITH SNOW


It fell again last night, just when we thought
we couldn't live any more with the view--the shack
and its broken dock, the bleached driftwood caught
like snapped bone in the rocks--and it softens the shock
of day, this immaculate poultice of cold scum
shed from an overcast infected with chem-smoke
where the sea digests thousands of steel drums
(time capsules preserving the same dark joke)

and we're free again to clothe ourselves in slogans.
We remember why we are here. We rummage for bargains
like tireless mice in fifty acre malls
where the young lounge and wander, safely adrift,
dreaming of power and stealth, believing in Kraft
food stuffs, video rock and lottery windfalls.


SOLSTICE


Stalactites of ribbed ice hang from the eaves.
A whisky jack sits on a branch, cowlicked
by the shrill wind. He is not dreaming of leaves
or the tall grass that’s been cut, bundled and hayricked.

Out on the frozen river, fishermen stare
at their rigs: a line, a bell, a black hole.
The sound that bristles along each wind flare
is loose change dropped into a bowl.

Snow falls like scratched light from an old
film or a shattered mirror. It flashes, drives
them deeper inside, where they clench against the cold.
But their stillness masks an aggressive patience, a desire
to stay awake until the dark arrives,
the darkest night of the year, the dead of winter.


BEFORE, AND AFTER


1

On the airport bus,
ice-light makes me think

we=re crossing the badlands
of an abandoned planet,

sun-dogs
like matched trumpet notes,

low dunes, white
and sleek as quicklime, smoking

where the wind sharpens
their curved lips, and now,

out of nowhere, this
graveyard without a fence,

this extinct outpost
of stones, weathered


inscriptions half silted up
with alkali snow, glides

by, behind glass,
like some display in a museum.


2

The travellers have returned,
their clothes only slightly soiled,
their gear intact. Their eyes are still
bright with what they have seen:
mountains clean as flint chips,
blown curtains of snow.

There is a lightness, an absence
in the way they move
through the strange rooms of the house,
picking up and replacing things
they are not really sure belong there,
their glances, their fingers
lingering distractedly over surfaces, textures...


The close air is faintly scented
with memory, and the shifting light recalls
a web of associations
they never thought about before,
but lived
in, a habitude, a style
that has become remote, and they
demur, bemused, enclosed by shadowy moods
they recognize but cannot re-enter.

They are happy to be back, they say
this to each other
in subtle ways though their words
are thin, reaching like intangible probes
into all that was once careless
and familiar,
until their voices are more secure,
exploring fresh timbres, surprising
in their unaccustomed
spaciousness,
and as a comfortable silence opens
between, then around them, they turn


from each other,
and lose themselves in the view.

Late winter light
fades from the brushed chrome and smoky glass
of an office tower across the river. It seems
to have always dominated the landscape
though none of them can swear they have seen it before.


SEEING HER


1

Out in the dark at forty below
the gale sweeps gritty snow

up from the fields, down from the sky
choking my head lights. I try

to imagine the highway between one break
in that white turbulence and the next, toe on the brake

heel on the accelerator. The heater fan
blows up a storm of crystals and

my face, my ears, ache in the chill.
I stop on the shoulder, stuff a blanket between the grill

and the radiator. Back on the road, it's not much better.
I should have written her a letter.

If this old wreck breaks down, I'll die out here.
Think of her smile. Think about pretzels and beer by a cheer-


ful fire. Miles. And miles. They feel like years.
Then, for no reason at all,