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?