Ice

Was the poet appropriately enough named Frost who spoke famously of ice. As a farmkid I did not have time for poets. They were too sing-songy, with rhymes so blunt they sometimes hurt. Besides, poets never wrote about real stuff, just the nice things; moon, June, spoon, flowers, sunsets, if occasionally valiant death. Nothing greasy, nothing on fire, never tractors, no hint of dogs or farts or BB guns. They wrote about girls like they were meant as angels, nothing about why they wore shiny underpants and were so conspicuously lumpy.

This poet who wrote of ice…“I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.” Is a rare thing for a farmkid in high school to remember the amble of a poem by a guy who probably doesn’t recall desire much less fire, but he wrote well of ice. What kid cannot think well of ice.

Ice that on some winter’s night turned the world into the Twilight Zone, with a gravity twice as quick and the ground again as solid. We did not let the cattle out of the barn on ice mornings lest they fall and break like teapots. It was routine for a neighbor farm to offer a side of beef because a cow had fallen and broke. Hurtful to see such a cow, we had sledges for them for they could not walk; a knowing sad look in their eyes. I hated that look but I liked ice, for there was no school. My father, a wise man, saw to it the chores on called-off days were some worse than regular, a more terrible and rude kind of chore. Calf pens, chicken coops, or something that required both a shovel and a long carry. Geometry suddenly wasn’t so bad, neither was Latin.

We cheated sometimes and crept away, for ice left no tracks. Put screws in the soles of old shoes, cut off their heads with a bolt cutter and went walking, didn’t matter where, all of it was different than what was before. With gravity so thick and smug I thought our ice-made-farm better resembled Jupiter or Neptune. The Earth transplanted to the outer cold, a dominion of ice and snow so much better than the sissy warm stuff.

We made for the woods in our hob-nailed, cluttering away on the ice like funeral gossips. Joyous as boys in a place rendered the better kind of empty. The woods we found were so very doomed. The slightest breeze jostled a tree and its limb broke off entire to lay bleeding before us. We put corn out for squirrels to watch them suffer and slip, unable to climb any but the most lenient tree, they scampered and missed in their net-less circus. We now understood what the Bible meant in the prophecy of the Fall. It is not the sin as the ice. Ice smooth as hand-rubbed lacquer, slick without compare except for Teflon, as has no place in poetry any more than BB guns.

It hurts a farmkid to say the woods were like jewelry. What a sissy thing to say, that a tree is jewelry. That was when real guys didn’t wear jewelry, not around their necks, not in their ears. Diamonds were for girls, forever, the ad said; I thought granite and obsidian also were forever. But when it comes to love it’s diamonds not tungsten. Still jewelry were those woods for we could think of no other comparison. Every branch worth millions. It seemed odd there was no intermediate metaphor between jewels and ice. Between Solomon’s treasure, between the Spanish treasure fleet, between the Crown jewels and that near woods rendered rich by a winter rain. Twinkling like a jewelry box is supposed to, wealth faceted at every branch. Through this trove the afternoon sun plunged, where once was one are now two suns, one the twin of the other and just as hot. Every tree afire as the phoenix, weighed down by so many carats, the gross national output of the world before our eyes.

Sometimes was only galoshes we wore; farmboys never buckled, the boots ringing as we went. Galoshes were never intended to be buckled if they can be taught so easily to sing. We skated across the marsh dunes eerie as otters, with no thought of how to get home again for supper.

Ice is great, said the poet, and will suffice. We who were farmboys for once thought well of poetry. For it too is brave and in one smart stroke, ice loosed the planet off its everyday halter, devalued deBoers, and went hunting with a gravity twice as grave. The woods became our Sheba and Elizabeth, our very own queen, all the world’s wealth now seen, if it cost an arm and a leg to behold, of gems more value than gold.

If only there was ice enough to cool that line.