Cat Dixon
Glacier
Why live here instead of there? Does it matter?
You live at the foot, the ice
melts faster than it grows,
and if you tilled the sheets
you’d discover a powdery rock,
gravel, sawdust-like mound
for the ice settles, thrusts, twists,
a lover in a king-sized bed
who can’t sleep alone. I live
where the ice thins
to nothing. Everything is
tinted blue like water. A duvet –
sky, ice, ocean – blankets all.
Why assimilate the years I slept with another –
you alone, an iceberg calved below sea level
to jet towards the sky like a leaping fish –
unless we need to?
Between us the brittle crevasses
are God’s dentures. He’s taken
them out for the night, left them
in a bathroom tumbler
soaking in Polident.
He has a million mouths, teeth
the size of doors and beds.
A hundred chasms widen, the parts
rub and touch deep below,
but from above one cannot tell
they even intersect.
Does God play dice?
We met once when
a surge slid us past one
another. Hidden
pools propel tongues
of ice to speak to each
rapidly as if words
would melt from the heat
of earth’s inner cavities.
These polished slopes, ridges
or caps, none are accidental.
The Case of Baskets
For Jack McCleury
He crashes the party, hands out
worksheets to classes that
never existed, disappears
into the backyard to smoke
and the party-goers ignore
his poetry mutterings, but the excitement
as Jack upon his return speaks
of this basket—the tall, coned doorman
at Kuzma's house—is contagious. He spins
it around, the base as his podium
to display the age, the composition.
It has sprung! He exclaims, then explains
that the base is the most difficult
aspect of basket-weaving. Here
the pressure and distance
of the spokes must be exact
and how could one not think
of the universe, each string
tied together in some complex
atom-packed and tucked basket
to display the stars, the mountains,
the animals, us, as flowers
arranged at the door to wherever
the universe starts and ends?
Cat Dixon earned her M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska. Currently, she's a stay-at-home mother for her children, Pierce and Leven, and the volunteer Publicity Director for The Backwaters Press in Omaha, Nebraska.