In the icelight

the only bloom

Hello friends—

It has been dipping into near zero temps over the past week. One benefit of an older house is that at those temps, ice ferns grow silently and abound on windows. I’ve loved their icy magic ever since I first lived in a northern clime and became acquainted with cold winters. And it had me thinking long on how things we are so often told to guard against—the cold, the dark, e.g.—can be sources of unexpected joy when we don’t accept what we’re told.

Alone I look into the eye of ice

It's going nowehere, which is my home.
And always the flat miraculous land breathing ceaseless,
Creaseless, ironed by what hand, smoothed under whose hum?

A wine-eyed sun, an air of laundered poverty,
Consoling by its sense of having been consoled.
Then times ten times ten the trees...endlessly.
Eyesight like bootsteps, icelight like bread, innocent, bold....

(January 16, 1937)
             —Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Christian Wiman