Full Description
In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger's Ice indexes the findings from memory's slow melt—stories and faces we've forgotten, bones hidden in frost.
"I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this," Keplinger writes. "You are asking that same question." In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, "searching for a way to stay in pain forever"; a grandmother mending socks, "her face in the dark unchanging"; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.
With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we've harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf's head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother's phantom. "I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I've misshapen," Keplinger writes.
So is there "a point to all this singing"? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf's head can't, either. But sometimes, "out of the snow of confusion," something answers, "saying gorgeous things like yes." And the flowers "open up / their small green trumpets anyway."
Contents
I.
Ice 3
The Puppet Tiger That Masculinity Is 5
Canto 6
Almost 7
Near Yakutia 9
My Mother Remembers What Happened 10
Rocker 11
Irises 12
Lemming of the Ice Age 13
Ice Moons 14
Sketch of Wings in Gorham's Cave 16
The Conger Ice Shelf Has Collapsed 18
Spartak the Lion Cub Lives under the Permafrost 20
Come and See 21
Traveling 23
At Osip Mandelstam's Memorial Statue in Voronezh 24
Two Horses in a Field 25
The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is 26
II.
Chameleon 31
The Future of Desire 32
The North 34
Mirror, on the Night of Your Passing 36
American History in Místek 39
What It Could Be Like . . . 40
Adages for Dragons 41
Elation 42
Pomade 43
Small Pink Reading Glasses 44
Memory, a Snowfall 45
My Mother Reading Dickinson at the End 47
Erosion 49
Possess 51
American Thanksgiving in Místek 52
The Oar 53
The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog Surrender Is 57
Driving through Kansas at Night 58 Emerson 59
III.
Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark 63
Reading Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts 66
Reading Gilgamesh before Going to Sleep 67
Reading the Buffalo's Face 68
Reading Jake's Poems at the Southernmost Point 69
At the Museum of the Scalpel and the Ear Horn 70
Assembling the Bones into the Body of the Saint 73
At the Museum of Supernatural History 74
Reading James Wright in Martins Ferry, Ohio 75
Ghazal 77
Reading Light 78
A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz 80
The Last Reader of the Poems 81
The Long Answer 82
Is 85
Sonnet 87
Notes 89
Acknowledgments 91
