Blind Crevasse

Lisa Williams

                    -- Polar explorer Richard Byrd 

Hand by hand, over blistering slivers（裂片） 

 of ice scraping wrists and slithering（滑动） in ears, 

 hand by hand, with ferocious（残忍的） delicacy, 

 a furnace burning behind your efforts, 

 you pull your body away from that 

 crevasse（裂缝）, stand up, look back at what 

 you avoided, widening from one crack 

 to a vaster chasm hundreds of meters 

 down, sapphire（蓝宝石）, then emerald damask 

 on vertical plunging walls, an endless 

 corridor of spiked sea glass --

You were cheek on crystal, in a terrible fallen 

 field, your left leg dangling over 

 the roof of a crater toothed（锯齿状的） with punched 

 translucence. Ecstatic to leave the past, 

 to have glimpsed its Kublaian center, you 

 walk in an opposite direction 

but it's still close to you sometimes, 

 half-lit, a story you might enter, 

 a submerged star, its azure（蔚蓝的） pinnacles 

 ruminant. Did you think it wouldn't 

 fool you again, since you are safe 

 from its jewelled, devouring throat, the masked 

 abyssal（深海的） draw of its depression 

 covered by a fresh and blinding snow?