Poetry by Kathleen Heideman
"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
Fri 10 Feb 2006