Sunday 19 August 2012

Sunday Poem

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

after Cavafy
The Franklin Expedition, 1845-48


When you set out to find your Northwest Passage
and cross to an empty region of the map

with a headlong desire to know what lies beyond,
sailing the thundering ice-fields on the ocean,

feeling her power move you from below;
when all summer the sun’s hypnotic eye

won’t blink, and the season slowly passes, an endless
dream in which you’re forever diving into pools,

fame’s image forever rising up to meet you;
when the fall comes, at last, triumphantly,

and you enter Victoria’s narrow frozen Strait,
and your Terror and Erebus freeze in the crushing floes;

in that long winter night among the steeples
of jagged ice, and the infinite, empty plain of wind and snow,

when the sea refuses to be re-born in spring,
three winters pass without a thaw, and the men,

far from their wives and children, far from God,
are murdering one another over cards;

when blue gums, colic, paralysis of the wrists
come creeping indiscriminately among you;

and you leave the ships, and set out on the ice,
dragging the lifeboats behind, loaded

with mirrors and soap, slippers and clocks,
into the starlit body of the night,

with your terrible desire to know what lies beyond;
then, half-mad, snow blind, even then,

before you kill the ones who’ve drawn the fatal lots,
and take your ghastly communion in the snow,

may you stumble at last upon some band of Inuit
hauling their catch of seal across the ice,

and see how foolish you have been:
forcing your way by will across a land

that can’t be forced, but must be understood,
toward a passage just now breaking up within.

From Sailing to Babylon (2012) by James Pollock.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could arrange this as prose and not lose anything. Why not prose? Why arrange with line breaks? It flows along as somewhat mellifluous prose; it doesn't need to be a poem.

James Pollock said...

Thanks for "mellifluous," and thanks for reading, but let me point out that the poem is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter).


Andy McGuire said...

Well done, James. For me, yr poem recalls the memory of standing in front of the three graves on Beechy Island: beautiful, terrific, awe-ful, tragic, hilarioius, etc, all amounting to a kind of grappling for some sort of impossible mental orientation. Also, "with mirrors and soap, slippers and clocks" is kinda the best.

James Pollock said...

Thanks Andy!

John said...

A beautiful poem that at once captures both the mood of a long harsh period in life and a single moment in time.

James Pollock said...

Much obliged, John. For more poems from the book, click on my name, which will take you to my Web site.