The Ice House Poem by Lisa Russ Spaar

When my daughter fights on the phone
with her boyfriend, even her side
of the story unintelligible as my pain -

bruised, alto, altering the lit hallway
between our rooms—I think of the ice house:
pineal, subterranean light,

cave dug in a creek bank among a ganglia
of ponds, its snug, clapboard dormer
a white-washed domestication

of the wildness within, winter felled
beneath corbelled ceiling, slabs of ice
sawn from frozen stream and coulee,

tonged onto sledges, hauled & packed
among straw, sawdust—so that, in the heat
of rage, or age, or passion,

what shivers of sweet sorbet,
what unlikely shocks of whine-numbing joy
issue from its galaxy, its dipper.