“The sea’s cold,” is all you write from Antarctica, “and we haven’tseen any penguins yet. Hope we do.” How to analyzethat icy wilderness, with its harsh arc of grandiose majesty,luminous glaciers otherworldly in the setting sun? The Earth’sveins will be hidden deep beneath the icicle-crusted ground,my friend, and the surreal wonders of stepping onto landafter many days at sea, a sensation to conquer. I rememberthose waterfalls of ice, pluming into the distant raysof an underwater moon. Stinging chandeliers, jellyfish,pulsed deadly, deadly under a human touch, yet beguiling,a universal gravity drawing the fingers to the stingers.Translucent lives floated and flowered in a primal ripple-ring of wild nerves,

and plastic floating billowed out like hollow silk. The driftof marine snow impacts our small universe of steel pens,the kettle’s familiar whistle and scissors left unpackedfrom their case. We journeyed down the wild underwater cavern,that labyrinth of darkness, a metallic lake, the Southern Ocean,reflecting and dissolving ourselves as we really were. As if the pulsing of theboat was gone, and we were no longer tethered tothat rope on which hung life . . . and death.It’s been a thousand years, feels like it, since I descendedthe staircase of ice and snow for the first time.

How, then, back from our trip, has life shrunk to this bare minimum? I gnawon my pencils; suddenly the tree in someone else’s gardenflushes red, blood on branches acidly looking up to the sky,and shifting forms in textures evolve. We walked together in Antarctica,strolling from the point where universe meets universeand back, breezes whipping endlessly,our twin fingerprints glowing transparentlyon Antarctic, sacred land. Now you are on another expedition, and we moveon different axes; you acknowledge the penguinsbut do not study their very form, shape, soul, like me, tiny wrigglingbulbs of black and white, alighting into the ocean.At night the color palettes would spring and turn above.

Your final visitation was a quick one, that ghostly gazeof departure to Antarctica already spreading its languorous translationall over your pale silken face—imagining zodiacs,moving images in a world magnified by its sheer, brutal barrenness,and an escape to endless stars wheeling, evenblizzards pouring down from the polar axis’s hemisphere.