Step out
onto white

not as a body
bearing any weight

but as a feather
might.

Think
of ink

in a quill
drawing a cantata

out of
light.

The wind is visiting
New Harbor
for once the chill
and light of midnight
bow down
and listen.

We shelter
inside the Jamesway.
Outside, five flags
are live skins
shocked into action
by some ancient

command. They brace
themselves and beat
like drums that thrum
and thrum
and thrum until sleep
overcomes.

Claire Beynon spent October and November 2005 as part of a team of researchers at Explorers Cove, New Harbor, and wrote these poems there after a precarious end-of-season walk in front of the camp where the pack ice was beginning to thaw. She lives in South Africa and New Zealand.

"There's nothing out there."
—Fred Eisele, describing the Polar Plateau

"The water never sounds malicious, exactly, but it's clear that its power is so far beyond human scale that if it crushed us, with a sudden twitch, it would never notice..."
—Genn MacDonald on Aube (music review)

We are curious by nature, curious—yet find we yearn for something we already know:
at the end of the Taylor Valley, sunlight outlines every detail, but there's no "human scale" --
nevertheless, we find ourselves sizing up each glacier — Hello? — appraising each dome of snow,

as if it were a stranger in a dark bar, a 3-bdrm bungalow we might be purchasing. Aren't your Asgaards low,
compared to the Rockies — I mean, wouldn't we grow to love them less in time? Our echo bounces, hails
itself, tumbles into icy scree below. Hello there Friendly by nature, yet we yearn for what we know:

each human eye contains a tiny yardstick marked with pencil: "average pine tree, average crow" —
when we are uncertain, we lift that eye to the world. WHAT EXPERTS KNOW: before shooting, exhale.
Better photographs are the reward for being still. Hello? — You try being still, sizing up this snow —

I've seen how we throw ourselves upon it, expecting powder, the snow is different here, a noun with no
verbish give, cement, glassine, or grains in spin-drifts. The cloud is waist-high. The horizon provides no scale
for us to weigh this world upon, so we go on calculating, under-estimating, yearning for what we know

of elsewhere: bricks, timbers to build a home with. We used to have a yardstick: "average love, average plateau"
but a polar plateau runs for — what, a thousand miles? No bookstores, electrical lines, sentinel pines; we fail
to find our familiar; yet the eye darts around, an optimistic crow in search of broken twigs beneath snow,

another crow. Yardsticks smooth as skiis, we slide backwards. the eye wants one blasted tree in the snow,
so we can figure the distance to the plateau. Is that too much to ask? Where does the tailor hem the Tale?
My uncle trained a crow to say hello. Hello it said — that's all it knew. We are curious by nature but know
even a trained crow prefers answers, yes or no, to endless distance, endless greetings, endless snow.

Kathleen Heideman spent November of 2005 in Antarctica through the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program. Her project website is Scientific Method: Poems of Antarctic Inquiry. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Image: Antarctica (without), Michelle Ott

Poetry by Helen Paul

When men were men they starved and died
Or froze or larked about and made
Adventures, fraught with science, merely to have tried

To do the nearly inconceivable beside
Men made brothers by the blade
Of cold and sometimes hunger. Seals died

Helen Paul works for the United States Antarctic Program at McMurdo Station. When she is not in Antactica, she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Image: Vince's Cross at Hut Point, Bob Champoux

"There's nothing out there."
—Fred Eisele, describing the Polar Plateau

"The water never sounds malicious, exactly, but it's clear that its power is so far beyond human scale that if it crushed us, with a sudden twitch, it would never notice..."
—Genn MacDonald on Aube (music review)

We are curious by nature, curious—yet find we yearn for something we already know:
at the end of the Taylor Valley, sunlight outlines every detail, but there's no "human scale" --
nevertheless, we find ourselves sizing up each glacier — Hello? — appraising each dome of snow,

as if it were a stranger in a dark bar, a 3-bdrm bungalow we might be purchasing. Aren't your Asgaards low,
compared to the Rockies — I mean, wouldn't we grow to love them less in time? Our echo bounces, hails
itself, tumbles into icy scree below. Hello there Friendly by nature, yet we yearn for what we know:

each human eye contains a tiny yardstick marked with pencil: "average pine tree, average crow" —
when we are uncertain, we lift that eye to the world. WHAT EXPERTS KNOW: before shooting, exhale.
Better photographs are the reward for being still. Hello? — You try being still, sizing up this snow —

I've seen how we throw ourselves upon it, expecting powder, the snow is different here, a noun with no
verbish give, cement, glassine, or grains in spin-drifts. The cloud is waist-high. The horizon provides no scale
for us to weigh this world upon, so we go on calculating, under-estimating, yearning for what we know

of elsewhere: bricks, timbers to build a home with. We used to have a yardstick: "average love, average plateau"
but a polar plateau runs for — what, a thousand miles? No bookstores, electrical lines, sentinel pines; we fail
to find our familiar; yet the eye darts around, an optimistic crow in search of broken twigs beneath snow,

another crow. Yardsticks smooth as skiis, we slide backwards. the eye wants one blasted tree in the snow,
so we can figure the distance to the plateau. Is that too much to ask? Where does the tailor hem the Tale?
My uncle trained a crow to say hello. Hello it said — that's all it knew. We are curious by nature but know
even a trained crow prefers answers, yes or no, to endless distance, endless greetings, endless snow.

Kathleen Heideman spent November of 2005 in Antarctica through the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program. Her project website is Scientific Method: Poems of Antarctic Inquiry. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Image: Antarctica (without), Michelle Ott