"City bombarded with icicles"

barrier tape is still bandaging trees
its crime scene garishness
torn away overnight by the living
passing through, perimeters
closed
for icicle warnings:
those transparencies thickened
to stalactite honed
by a roof’s slow drip
to clumped ice dams above heads
dangerous architecture
keeping pedestrians
on their toes, a crash the size of a car impending
above a threshold,
some squared to drain pipes
reaching from roof to street,
others as long as two or three floors
of menacing overhead
and that burst of sun
melting
frozen fists to a sigh of one slipping loose
strangest blow of heaven
this time chunks harmlessly into the walk, strangest blow
of heaven, breaking the window
of a car,
strange
as a window
falling from its chain suspended
above the cafeteria's table
to shatter upon
the head of one child
wearing a frame of brokenness around her neck,
a jag sheering toward her throat,
how to move through this new terrain
dangerous for people down here
dangerous for people up there
that man whacking ice
from his roof
the postal carrier
gauging the drip, drip, drip
of threat, different
risks of freezing
falling
wings, not clouds or lazy circling eagles, but icicle-related injuries
along the walkways,
so many
unnamed, unknown
looking up in something like alarm,
uncertain
where is the clear path for getting to school on Monday
winding one's way through,
so much new is unknown,
even those clumped bushes, each one a shock of wiry branches
knotted to one root
whiplike, stripped of leaves,
nothing left but a host of tiny red berries
what are they called? why always forgetting to ask?
the only color blooming
in ice so many
could be galaxies constellated
to random, aperiodic order,
arrayed in mythic figure and story ripening
before any eye has been born
with power to see and fix them to imagined
shape, though the new stories perhaps
would resemble the old, the heart evolves so slowly
and there are only a few predictable ends,
are they edible? poisonous?
and to whose tongue?
perhaps some creature
could eat them and go on singing,
or are they some variety, human cultivars
cultivated to appeal
to the garden’s predictable shapes of temptation unmeant
for living hand or tongue
beautiful singularity,
piercing intensities of red
and specificities
of shape which resist metaphor while inviting
it, drops of blood?
like those leeched carefully
from the acupuncturist’s tiny lancet
extracting
too much heat or too much masculinity or feminity
from a particular body or draining
the anguish
of pressure point?
or self-contained
shining in their
spheres, like eggs or earths,
each one a tiny world meant to seed some meadow
they will splinter and burst
to reach, be willingly devoured,
consumed into another,
or like the seed some saint visions on the hand of god
and sees all world, all eye,
dreaming within, or was that a fig or a nutmeg?
or perhaps secular and many, their shapes
of young women's or men's nipples
brushed to erectile
breath or hand,
but, no, only the shape allows,
that color is rather
of lips bit to blood, lipstick, something, nothing but what
associating mind brings
as the fool wandering a field of snow brings along weeds of fled
goathead in heel, burr in palm, festered nettle
beneath the skin

themselves, too bright, inutterable, unnamed, in this field of snow
the transport
transplantation, accidental transmigration, you
who have no name for what you walk among
as the sun transpires in the skin of the berries

transects the hazarded edges
and that legion of frozen angels
begins to loose its grip
and falls
shattering or merely
melting into the melting earth

*headline borrowed from the Boston Globe

Rebecca Seiferle 12.17am 2.2.05 Waltham MA USA