Iron And Ice Poem by Caroline Misner

Iron And Ice



The smallest house had a black roof
and scarlet bricks, that gleamed
in the midst of a white velvet field,
the largest lot in our neighbourhood;
I remember how moonlight lit back
the dusty snow and shone off its shingles
like onyx chips.

The lot lay rimmed with iron, the fence
pickets pierced the pebbly ice, the skin
of snow that lay supine upon the frigid yard,
below the shallow hill that rolled
from the woods; black bent branches grouped
and stiffened like mannequins in the
town’s shop windows.

Each spoke was glazed with ice,
crystal sheaths, smooth and shining;
the posts were tall and so regal
not even rust could scorch them, jutting
to the sky like bayonets, their muzzles
paying homage to the horizon that
severed the land from
the flat white winter sky.

When the boys played hockey in the street,
their sticks clanging against one another,
slashing at frozen tennis balls through air
still and numb with impeding grief;





even in winter the clotheslines were
ablaze with colour; sheets and undershirts
melded against the blankness of the sky;
dresses and pants jigged in the wind
until they stiffened into weird positions
like flat statues, and the clothespins
keeping them tethered like a hinge.

The hills crackled and glistened,
a mother-of-pearl carapace; even the telephone
wires sang with relief the morning after
the snowstorm’s passing; nothing remained
of the drab old world with its dark gutters
and dun houses, not even the iron fence.
The wind had blown a drift against it, only
the tips poked through, sharp as serpents’ tongues.

The same boys who had dared one another
to press their lips against the iron, all
but forgotten now beneath the sleeping
shroud of snow, took up their sleds and
flew downhill, their voices streaming
from them like a chuffing engine’s smoke.

At first they thought they heard a twig snap,
then sudden silence inhaled by the woods;
then blood. The snow sucked it up
and hoarded it below the crust, as though
the elixir could imbue life into its soulless grains;
the ice-coated pickets echoed back the boy’s
howls of anguish and pain.

An ambulance came to collect
what remained of him, swathed
in reckless despair, dragging
its red crossed heart behind it;
the house glowed like an ember
in a hearth of grey ash.
No matter how hard I shut my eyes
and concentrate, I cannot
wish that day away.

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