"The Icehouse in Summer"

I came across this cool (ha!) little poem today while catching up on my Poem of the Day podcast. I like how it makes you think about the coldest winter in the middle of the summer, although neither set of images is particularly comforting. 

"The Icehouse in Summer"

Howard Nemerov

see Amos, 3:15

 

A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt

thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door   

the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light,   

an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern:   

decaying seasons keeping from decay.

A summer guest, the boy had never seen   

(a servant told him of it) how the lake

froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams,   

with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice,   

translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun,   

load them on sleds and drag them up the hill   

to be manhandled down the narrow path   

and set in courses for the summer’s keeping,   

the kitchen uses and luxuriousness

of the great houses. And he heard how once

a team and driver drowned in the break of spring:   

the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer   

frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace.

Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen   

among the slowly blunting water walls

where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite   

was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned

in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child

who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests

run from a ghostly wall, so long before

the winter house fell with the summer house,

and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.

 

[There's audio here, too.]

By the way, Amos 3:15 (referenced below the title) reads "And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith the LORD."