Two Poems – Robert McCarthy

Siberia Fantasia

                                i

Here “dead of winter” is diagnosis
not metaphor. Death applies itself,
voluble, easy in the long dark.
Too much susceptible to its small talk,
its assiduous charm, all the warm-bodied,
shrunken things briefly alive inside
the outsides of their skins; in the fanged cold,
death, multiples of means, opportunities,
pervasive in the circadian circuit
of night following night following night.

Stricken in the dark, flesh taken unawares;
helms of ice blooming on misshapen heads,
breaths that have condensed to iron masks,
affixed to miens the heat has been harried
from, by a sub-zero wolfpack.
                                                         Each human mien
scoured, overscored, assuming much of the look
the landscape has: scars and fells, stubble uplands,
the whole of it lapsed in snow’s fathoms-deep
obliterations, drifts planed smooth; features,
identifying marks, subsumed, invisible.

Capes, stone-stacked plinths, gorges filled and flattened,
mountain-ranges’ white erasures. Void, all maps
here, where the sun is a buffeted matchstick,
candle-flame rocking on horizon’s headlong
edge; proscenium where the cold performs
its sublimations: viz, a freshly laundered
nightgown lifting vertically from the ground,
as if inhabited by invisibility,
by damp stiffened into sinews, by frost’s
transparent bones.
                                         You are here; where earth’s
an iron mixture of methane and ice,
so much, then, for Siberia in winter.

                                 ii

The light, here, now, is a double sun – meshed,
misted-over – hung high in the summer
Siberian sky, static, suspended,
pinned to the zenith of its diurnal
ellipticals, a newly fixed star
entangled in a cirrus shroud, horsetail
cloud-web; Jericho’s high-noon
pronation, rotating backwards-facing.
A parallax view is Sol’s imbricated
conjoined-twin, glaring over its own
shoulder at fire where its glance falls, at streams
of burning vapor; a binary dose
of accelerants ladled to the atmosphere,
‘til light itself begins to melt, under-
mining the buried joists, the permafrost
thaws and shifts, its shelves and strata warping,
its layered years of leaf-falls, organics,
mineral debris, elderly ice, collapsing
into sloughs, ponds, coin-shaped lakes fed by no
rivers, water’s perfect ovals and oblongs,
but not as they would have been formed, accreted,
by nature. Rather as if by hands and minds
excavated. These bodies of water,
the enterprise of goblin geometers, each
replenished by the sweat of overheated
soils. Thaws, slumps, thermo-cataclysms are
common here, where light for heat has exchanged
itself, disturbing tribes asleep half the year
in alternations estival; hibernal;
determined by parts-per-mil of toxins
and long-dormant pathogens coming up
for air from squelchy boglands. Shallow-
rooted trees—birch, alder, colliding firs—
tilt obliquely, drunken, as if melt-water
were vodka suffusing roots anyway doomed
to consummate themselves in fires mythic
in their underworld combustion, nudging
taiga tumuli towards eruption
as gas expands, heaves upward sod rockets
trailing alluvial contrails.
                                                Hot rain.
Epoch Anthropocene.
Such, then, is Siberia in summer.

Ice Auguries

*Ice cores are essentially frozen time capsules… to reconstruct
climate far into the past.* icecores.org

                                i

Crystal radios, perhaps.
Archaic semaphores, signals
from the deep past. Ice-cores suspended
in lozenges of glass, curated,

here, in this museum of phantoms,
where we biopsy primeval
ecologies; probe lesions wrenched
from frost-giant corpse-stacks,

the scavenged organs of glacial
cadavers. Here we taste-test
geologic frappés, the rare

toxin bubbles of anoxic rain.

                                 ii

Ice aspirations, coughed out in
hyperbaric chambers, tell us
what old-world weather was like,
how the sky turned methane-green,

the temperature like fever;
glassy oceans still as bated
breaths.
                 Strange days indeed, these,
the curators no longer

needing to drill. Melting ice,
having chosen revelation,
releases weather from another
world, or from when this world was other,

not yet man-handled, still exotic
its perfumes, pollutants, its pits
of surprised megafauna cooked
alive in their wet bulbs of flesh.

                                 iii

Paleo light, loosed from the ice,
shudders to have recognized itself—
though not the new world it shines
upon, its surfaces abused, city-stained,

its lightfalls disquieting, jagged
through a burdened air. Everything’s
gone mysterious; black-box
migrations to magnetic nowheres.

Meanwhile, offstage, climates jostle,
as violent as human
history (which recurs not as farce
but as the Eocene, ice-free).

The curators meanwhile keep busy,
decoding the ice auguries,
whose signs are eschatology.
Morituri. Ave. Tuti.

---

Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use formal means to achieve lyric ends. Robert has published poetry in The Alchemy Spoon (Summer 2020) and Dreich Magazine (S3/D4, August 2021). His work has also appeared in the Fall 2021 issues of Yours, Poetically and Neologism Poetry Journal; as well as in the December 2021 issues of Words & Whispers, Celestite Poetry, Fahmidan Journal, and in the Spring 2022 issue of Version(9). Robert is on Twitter: @RobCodbiter

Banner & Art: Cypher Drop Kick, Visual poem variants by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2023. Twitter: @frede_kenter IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.