CANTO 13 I come up smoking

 

I come up smoking through Erebus—where Antarctic winds

whirl off the immense south polar ice dome.

The shrieking 60’s whistle

through their own teeth, mighty Hendrixes of wind

flinging themselves against prevailing Aristotelian westerlies,

storms so fierce at that "pole of inaccessibility"

that I rest a bit under barrier ice,

in the slow-creeping Hegelian

bottom-water that mimics the circular commotion

of the meteor-ideological confusion above.

In Panthalassan calm I glide still protected

by the Diamond T, ranging over abyssal plains

where magnetic stripes from the earth’s reversing poles

play sedimental recordings, the singer

wanting part of you.

I edge into jagged trenches, snake over a

thin layer of serpentine

where a volcano bubbles out bits

of Bob Dylan’s sunken nasal armada, hearing as I rise

electronic music mimicking songs of the last blue whale

whose rib-cage sways on a sea-mount.

Now I remember.

I accelerate up past mile-thick ice,

break the surface, Diamond T Polaris

that shoots past sheer ice cliffs

glittering red and green,

that becomes a Strangelove bomb I’m astride,

shapeshifting now to a shiny monopole.

I’m sliding down into the clanging firehouse of today,

the firehouse itself on fire!

This dawn washes treetops

already clean in themselves and perfect.

How clearly the half-moon

gives the light of its features to the blue

we know to be black and ourselves blue

in the sing-song fandango of our clangor!

Hear the full-bellied woodnotes,

wild sweet William finch, smell the

wild sweet William phlox,

feel the gathering of a strength.