I have been working at this bastard for years. I think I am at Oscar Wilde’s famous point of taking a comma out all morning then putting it back in at night.

Among the many things that make me think of images, lines, and phrases is “The Sublime”.  I have always loved the aesthetic extreme, from Baroque to the ridiculousness of the Gothic.  So here you are, The Sea of Ice.  This is not a feminist statement or a political one – it’s a folly in the garden of my imagination.

Bleeding and plagued, I have wandered farther than I should. I have traveled here alone and dying, and I have broken her repose. I stain the marble with my blood, my finite life a joke in the face of centuries.

My suffering is nothing in this splendor,
Nothing to the wind and burning cold.
Shards of late orange light fall around me,
Encroaching dusk howls, early stars slide over the edge. Patterns rise, unknown to me, tales from an alien time.

They watch my progress – they know how it ends.

I struggle on, I make my last offering to her.
She rises – in her own time – to accept.
Queen of keening night, Queen of shearing space.
She laps and folds, tooth over bone,
Every word forced through a rictus grin-
I am no more, I cede all to her majesty,
Her robes the ice of eons,
Her crown the lipless wind.