Send Me To Deception

Send me in search of cold word on Deception Island,

for inspiration fighting the winds of Neptune’s bellows.

Send me to Antarctica to find prose in that driest desert,

to the icy land for a glimpse through the sea god's window.

Send me to the last place on earth to imagine explorers lost

footpaths, trace burials, Scott and Amundsen's race to the south pole!

Send me to marvel at Transantarctic Mountain, Queen Maud,

to that coldest driest windiest de facto condominium.

Send me to explore with the hardened extremophiles

in the clean southern waters of the world ocean.

Send me to wax poetic of the three flowering plants

giving descriptors of bluegrass, hair wort, and pearlgrass.

Send me to chase the lights of one clear austral summer,

to flyby Erebus and Terror turning saints into the sea.

Send me to the rift zone delicate yet violent volcanic reality

opposite the north, south of the 60, to feel my parched chapped lips.

Send me to follow footpaths of all the last entries of confusion,

dying declarations of beauty, of static shock, and chronic dehydration.

Send me to dress formal as the penguins, to hear the earless seal

and marvel at the wingspans of polar skuas and wandering albatross.

Send me to gather the poetics of killer whales and dusky dolphins,

find rhyme with chinstraps, emperors, crab eaters, and elephants.

Send me to warm muddy baths of the horseshoe caldera of deception

where feisty fungi feast on archaeological artifacts in a treeless landscape.

Send me with team midas before Larsen C collapses into the Weddell sea,

before frozen ice stream flow to ice shelf; crack, branch, and calve!

Send me to every place named after a ship, to subglacial Lake Vostok

to learn to describe the flowing currents of that pristine lake in the east.

Send me to this place where last words go to die –to leave one poem,

me– my ice creeping face up to the stars inside furry side skinside outside...