South × South
Poems from Antarctica
Charles Hood
ohio university press
athens
North, south, east, and west run the lines. A fence, a farm road, a row of trees, the tight streets of a sleepy county seat, a uniquely American graffiti. Only in the sky can we emerge from these surroundings to discover the scale of the experiment that has been worked upon us.
—William Langewiesche, Inside the Sky
Food for the Moon
Good place to meet dead people,
Antarctica. White like a hospital. Go fetch that colored nurse,
she’s nicer than the others. My father died saying it was late,
dinner was over, he was going to get up and bang
out the dishes, forgetting he was dead
give or take a day or two already.
He always did like taking trips. Now I show him the map,
pressing it facedown on the grass so he can read it without
his glasses. It is British and nicely printed. Here is the dirigible
mooring mast and here is the pioneer cemetery. Here is the sea ice.
Here is the place between the scratches in the light
where I will go to line up with the men
who wear wooden slits for masks,
who know how to eat seals,
who mush dogs and mend leather,
who even after the outside parts of their bodies turn black
and stiff will still ski to the moon on ivory blades
made from their own hand-carved teeth.
Waking Up with Mechanics
Do the same extras drive the cars in my dreams each night, or do they work in shifts? There can’t be more than forty or fifty cars; maybe they all come from a central lot, are shared out among us. Maybe that is why they drive so well. Somewhere between Christchurch and McMurdo I wake up in a web seat inside an Air Force C-17 in time to hear somebody say that when it comes down to it, you can use urine to rinse off just about anything.
And somebody else insists, no, not Wednesdays, it’s Thursdays that the condom bowl is refilled in 155, and all I know is that I already ate my lunch
and it’s not time to get up and put on our Big Reds,
and in one of the dreams there was a car sort of like the 1957 Bel Air my grandfather had, two-toned turquoise and cream, and wouldn’t it be cool to airlift one of those down to McMurdo and put on whitewalled snow tires and just to drive slowly up and down the gravel and ice of Highway One, lip-synching 1940s-era Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra, the only car without an emergency kit and a serial number for a thousand miles?
C-17, Pegasus Field
To land, a verb, meaning to blink a lot
and to use a Gomer Pyle outside voice
while still inside the plane. Sha-zaam.
Did I know that 300 feet of 29-degree saltwater
churning under 100 feet of cantilevered ice-ledge
covered by 30 feet of secondhand snow tamped
tight like a kind of paste made from cornflakes
painted white is all that’s holding
up this 200-ton C-17 that once carried Shamu
the crew chief asks.
I did not. Thank you. White
bunny boots like two Ls of burn-ward gauze. My head
has become a fat moon
in a small sky. Now he waves at a mouth
of light
and all the red angels behind you moan and push
and another angel on the ice windmills
like Pete Townsend and you stare down at the backlit ladder
between here and there thinking,
please don’t let me fall down.
It is so white and perfect and all
it seems impossible not to hold onto the doorway
a little longer while agreeing with Keats:
better if we were butterflies
and liv’d
but three summer days.
Tulips
Bill and Liza have divorced—in the Crary Lab I am reading about gentoo penguins—but Darby and Joan hang in there, as do all of the extended Ash-Dumps. It just sounds like something out of The Honeymooners. Johnnycakes wanders alone, uncertain. That little bastard Archie has a nest of hundreds of stones, ten times more than he needs, yet still steals constantly—the more abject the nest, the more he takes. Of the south side, only Leo is worse. Herbert intrudes on Horace and Alice; after a long day of battles, Alice goes off with Herbert to the site past the dump. Kinky or just curious, one still without a name favors necrophilia and will not leave the dead research specimens alone.
It makes me want to go back to school, become a post-doc, get a grant and come back here, just so I can name all of my study penguins after tulips. Candlelight (I will write) is a sport of Lucky Strike with better form even than Peer Gynt. Bestseller, Parade, Burning Love, Monte Carlo—of these, what more can be said? They died for science. Easter Surprise is a Tango that looks like a Rembrandt; yesterday he ate 22% more krill by weight and volume than Dreamboat, Cum Laude, or Zampa Rose. Black Hero joins Queen of the Night in the maroon-black void of deep water, a negative hole in the colony until they struggle back into the garden. Who noted the first eggs laid by Fringed Beauty? Cum Laude is a Single Late now that the Darwins have reorganized. We all have our parts in the passion: wing-tagged skuas rogue the distressed and the ill. Goya looks bad tonight. Harried and worn out, the Hocus Pocus clan loses feathers mid-rise. Some families will thrive, like Puget Sound and Olympic Flame, whose males preen and glow, fresh from the water. A vigorous form of Double Late, Uncle Tom’s demand climbs steadily, while Ted Turner could win a medal at a show, he has such good posture. Murillo barks he-haw with joy. Skuas pass and feint, then give up on Greigii, so perfectly black-backed he flares green and bronze. Maybe tomorrow or the day after Dreamboat will be snatched by a leopard seal, but today he stands on Alta Vista, ecstatic and tall, muddy footprints running like tan valentines up and down her back. We all want to be Dutch Triumphs. A row of clean, dark brown dirt waits behind the shorefast second-year ice. Clouds curl and lift. The sun on the upraised beak of Dreamboat makes it look like he is reaching for the sky one final time, and this time, if Alta will stay just a little bit more still, he is sure he will make it.
Things the Doctor Asks
That is an interesting scar,
were you an especially clumsy child?
Count backwards from one hundred
in multiples of pi. Hold out both hands.
If you die, may we cremate you?
Why does my stethoscope transmit
a dim hum like a hive of bees?
Now get dressed. You mean
you are not dressed yet even