Pamela Sutton

W.S. Merwin said: "Rain is very important to me; it's the most important metaphor of my life." Having had a father who was a fighter pilot in two wars, then an airline captain, certainly affected my psychological as well as aesthetic disposition. Precipitation, and other phenomena that originate from the sky, especially the image of flight, is a recurrent metaphor in my work. I have completed two book-length manuscripts of poems. This poem is taken from "Lithographica," which was a Finalist in the National Poetry Series, 2000. I need to re-work the book, then turn to my second manuscript of poems, tentatively entitled "20th Century Mosaic." The metaphorical backdrop for my second manuscript is the art of mosaics and the physics of neutrinos, which serve as a transforming stage for the science of fragmentation and the fragmentation of humanity that occurred in the 20th century. As in my first book, the palindromic image of flight serves as a source of magic, hope, and perhaps even redemption.
 

THERE IS A LAKE OF ICE ON THE MOON

Inna Cherniahivsky must be dead now. I promised
to visit, but I never did. One time I started
up the steps of the Philadelphia row home -
my first East Coast home - but faltered
at a puddle where the marble step had been worn
by habit, years, and rain.
There is a lake of ice on the moon. Life
on other planets is possible now, they say.
Once I almost rented a ruined apartment
with a balcony overlooking the most exquisite
trees - bark, purple-brown, just after the rain.
An expensive therapist told me I could see
only the trees. This was the problem.
I had no judgement or the wrong kind.
I had been raised in the country but lived
in the city. The problem, he said, I was from
the Midwest - the upper Midwest. It was true:
Each winter I hiked through knee-deep snow
to the lake - skates flung over my shoulder.
There was a chill while switching footwear,
but then so much pleasure lacing the skates
to the perfect tension. And a few hours
each day, each winter, between gelid discs of fire
and ice, that lake was mine. And the intimate
trees posed just for me. And places too far, too
deep to swim in summer, I could skate over -
blades cutting the surface. I could leap and land
hard - hearing, seeing, the ice boom and crack.

It never broke. Life was possible. Judgment,
perfect then; useless now. Who needs to know
in Philadelphia, the myriad colors of frozen water,
the wind chill factor, the angle of the sun, to judge
the thickness and quality of ice? And the trees -
could my therapist distinguish the eyes of a wolf
from knots in pine? Does he know the meaning of North -
sun setting at midnight - the uselessness of clocks -
seduction of hypothermia - or why one small puddle
on a marble stair can stop me cold?
When I was too young for the lake my father
made a pool of ice for me in the yard by running
the garden hose. He gave me double-bladed skates
for steadiness. It was night. It was bitter. But stars
like birches splintered the black forest sky.
Inna Cherniahivsky must be dead by now.
There is a lake of ice on the moon.