I
Highest, driest, coldest, windiest
continent, doubling its size in winter:
Emily's gone to Antarctica.

All that red hair on the ice!

*

Blue eyes, summer deep field
at Granite Harbour, an orange tent
between Asgard and Olympus

while I stand in the library, lost
between Acquisitions and Closed Reserve
and try to look after her

*

into the endless November light
where the mist
touches Discovery, touches

Terror, and the glaciers calve and thunder,
melt-water of whatever was freezing here
a million years before Christ
...