Antipodes
July 16 2009


Even in summer
it’s cold enough to see one’s breath.
At least they’ll know when we’re dead, we joked,
black humour
not yet spent.

Near the end, a man becomes irregular —
flurries of shallow breathing,
long slack-jawed spells.
You can see who’s next
huddled in the blanket where we left him,
beard thick with frost.
And this poor sod,
teeth chattering
breathing shallow, rapidly
desperately imagining
rescue.

While the rest of us, lost
are resigned
to God’s persistent deafness;
conserving our energy
breathing slowly, steadily
the acetone scent of the starved.
Cupping black and blistered fingers
around warm moist breath.

Some talk to themselves,
each word expelled
in a heavy cloud of mist,
as if speech could turn to ice
on contact —
flash-frozen letters
clattering down.

When we sleep, it almost stops;
slow regular breathing
probably dreaming
of sun-drenched beaches,
hot luxurious sand.

As Antarctic winds roar
and the flimsy shack shudders,
and this cursed continent
blows its lungs out.
A single candle flickers,
feeble shadows jump.
Our breath condenses on the ceiling
dripping down,
hardening
into stalactites of cloudy ice.
Breathing is no longer automatic,
and the effort
seems almost too much.

Even in summer
this place sucks the life from us —
wasted bodies
freeze-dried;
our dying breath
preserved in ice.




No, I wasn't reading about Hillary, or Franklin, or any other extreme explorer. Just a few unseasonably cold days in July: overcast, drizzly, incessant wind. I suppose it made it feel warmer, writing about the cold.

I don't know what I had in mind when I started this; but I ended up in Antarctica, holed up with Shackleton, dying heroically. I think the key here is the way, at the start of the penultimate stanza, I anthropomorphize the wind, and how this calls back to all the references to breath and breathing. It is almost as if a metronome runs through the poem, air moving methodically in and out, counting down in resignation to the end.

A bit of a departure here, as well, in that I let my medical background sneak in a bit: the Cheyne-Stokes breathing on the verge of death; the fingers blackened by frost-bite and dry gangrene; the acetone breath of starvation, a result of the ketone bodies produced by lipolysis. Just something for my literary biographers to make a fuss about. (As if!!)

...I was just about to sign off, when I remembered how the theme of "breath" became so instrumental in this poem. About the time I wrote it, I had been listening to the audio-book version of Lawrence Hill's "The Book of Negroes". There is a part where Amanita first arrives in New York from the South, and is shocked to see her breath. As I started in on this piece, that powerful image came immediately to mind, becoming an obvious hook and a natural point of departure.