=========== Dark Ice ===========

Part II	II

	(Hail fallen. Damper.) I retraced my steps Along uncertain melt and shifting gloss To somewhere near that spot: an empty barn (I think I glimpsed a black sleigh through the door, Cobwebbed and rotting, piled with newspapers); A house with broken windows--snow inside, And buckling front porch; the facing page A homely pond's translation of the scene.	Titles Part I Notes I Part II Notes II Part III Notes III Part IV Notes IV Part V Notes V Part VI Notes VI Part VII Notes VII Part VIII Notes VIII Part IX Notes IX Part X Notes X Part XI Notes XI Part XII Notes XII ©, Acknowledgments The Author

50	Icicles pattered Morse, then quieted; Fractures abounded; crystal refastenings Veined sturdy puddles under seamless sky The silvered inside of a vacuum jar. Following a sentence through the woods I found the lake (stop; foot-test: one step out), Tried its crackling solidity, Then walked the distance of its false expanse Onto (cold, crackless air) the other bank: Fir epaulets; rafts of sandy spar;

60	Abandoned border-crossings. Past strange trees A tangled log was partly visible, Transliterated into alphabets Splitting and sapless, partly burnt, part curled Like old dry vines. Whew. I tromped across Black sticks with weedy diacriticals, Vowel-slips of ooze and consonants of ice, Carefully sounding out each patch of thaw Against a heavy, insulated sole, And stopped among birches--seeing just ahead

70	Cyrillic of a slumped barbed-wire fence: My blunt feet felt another continent. Bare vines; indecipherable cold. Just past those empty forms were, glimmering, A plaza and planted trees: beyond the shades Of iron poles and humps of sooty snow, A crowd of citizens confronting tanks.


Part I	Part III