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South × South

Poems from Antarctica

Charles Hood

ohio university press

athens

North, south, east, and west run the lines. A fence, a farm road, a row of trees, the tight streets of a sleepy county seat, a uniquely American graffiti. Only in the sky can we emerge from these surroundings to discover the scale of the experiment that has been worked upon us.

—William Langewiesche, Inside the Sky

Food for the Moon

Good place to meet dead people,

Antarctica. White like a hospital. Go fetch that colored nurse,

she’s nicer than the others. My father died saying it was late,

dinner was over, he was going to get up and bang

out the dishes, forgetting he was dead

give or take a day or two already.

He always did like taking trips. Now I show him the map,

pressing it facedown on the grass so he can read it without

his glasses. It is British and nicely printed. Here is the dirigible

mooring mast and here is the pioneer cemetery. Here is the sea ice.

Here is the place between the scratches in the light

where I will go to line up with the men

who wear wooden slits for masks,

who know how to eat seals,

who mush dogs and mend leather,

who even after the outside parts of their bodies turn black

and stiff will still ski to the moon on ivory blades

made from their own hand-carved teeth.

Waking Up with Mechanics

Do the same extras drive the cars in my dreams each night, or do they work in shifts? There can’t be more than forty or fifty cars; maybe they all come from a central lot, are shared out among us. Maybe that is why they drive so well. Somewhere between Christchurch and McMurdo I wake up in a web seat inside an Air Force C-17 in time to hear somebody say that when it comes down to it, you can use urine to rinse off just about anything.

And somebody else insists, no, not Wednesdays, it’s Thursdays that the condom bowl is refilled in 155, and all I know is that I already ate my lunch

and it’s not time to get up and put on our Big Reds,

and in one of the dreams there was a car sort of like the 1957 Bel Air my grandfather had, two-toned turquoise and cream, and wouldn’t it be cool to airlift one of those down to McMurdo and put on whitewalled snow tires and just to drive slowly up and down the gravel and ice of Highway One, lip-synching 1940s-era Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra, the only car without an emergency kit and a serial number for a thousand miles?

C-17, Pegasus Field

To land, a verb, meaning to blink a lot

and to use a Gomer Pyle outside voice

while still inside the plane. Sha-zaam.

Did I know that 300 feet of 29-degree saltwater

churning under 100 feet of cantilevered ice-ledge

covered by 30 feet of secondhand snow tamped

tight like a kind of paste made from cornflakes

painted white is all that’s holding

up this 200-ton C-17 that once carried Shamu

the crew chief asks.

I did not. Thank you. White

bunny boots like two Ls of burn-ward gauze. My head

has become a fat moon

in a small sky. Now he waves at a mouth

of light

and all the red angels behind you moan and push

and another angel on the ice windmills

like Pete Townsend and you stare down at the backlit ladder

between here and there thinking,

please don’t let me fall down.

It is so white and perfect and all

it seems impossible not to hold onto the doorway

a little longer while agreeing with Keats:

better if we were butterflies

and liv’d

but three summer days.

Tulips

Bill and Liza have divorced—in the Crary Lab I am reading about gentoo penguins—but Darby and Joan hang in there, as do all of the extended Ash-Dumps. It just sounds like something out of The Honeymooners. Johnnycakes wanders alone, uncertain. That little bastard Archie has a nest of hundreds of stones, ten times more than he needs, yet still steals constantly—the more abject the nest, the more he takes. Of the south side, only Leo is worse. Herbert intrudes on Horace and Alice; after a long day of battles, Alice goes off with Herbert to the site past the dump. Kinky or just curious, one still without a name favors necrophilia and will not leave the dead research specimens alone.

It makes me want to go back to school, become a post-doc, get a grant and come back here, just so I can name all of my study penguins after tulips. Candlelight (I will write) is a sport of Lucky Strike with better form even than Peer Gynt. Bestseller, Parade, Burning Love, Monte Carlo—of these, what more can be said? They died for science. Easter Surprise is a Tango that looks like a Rembrandt; yesterday he ate 22% more krill by weight and volume than Dreamboat, Cum Laude, or Zampa Rose. Black Hero joins Queen of the Night in the maroon-black void of deep water, a negative hole in the colony until they struggle back into the garden. Who noted the first eggs laid by Fringed Beauty? Cum Laude is a Single Late now that the Darwins have reorganized. We all have our parts in the passion: wing-tagged skuas rogue the distressed and the ill. Goya looks bad tonight. Harried and worn out, the Hocus Pocus clan loses feathers mid-rise. Some families will thrive, like Puget Sound and Olympic Flame, whose males preen and glow, fresh from the water. A vigorous form of Double Late, Uncle Tom’s demand climbs steadily, while Ted Turner could win a medal at a show, he has such good posture. Murillo barks he-haw with joy. Skuas pass and feint, then give up on Greigii, so perfectly black-backed he flares green and bronze. Maybe tomorrow or the day after Dreamboat will be snatched by a leopard seal, but today he stands on Alta Vista, ecstatic and tall, muddy footprints running like tan valentines up and down her back. We all want to be Dutch Triumphs. A row of clean, dark brown dirt waits behind the shorefast second-year ice. Clouds curl and lift. The sun on the upraised beak of Dreamboat makes it look like he is reaching for the sky one final time, and this time, if Alta will stay just a little bit more still, he is sure he will make it.

Things the Doctor Asks

That is an interesting scar,

were you an especially clumsy child?

Count backwards from one hundred

in multiples of pi. Hold out both hands.

If you die, may we cremate you?

Why does my stethoscope transmit

a dim hum like a hive of bees?

Now get dressed. You mean

you are not dressed yet even

after all this time? Shut up

and stop counting. Open the door.

You will need Diamox, for the Pole.

You will need to shave those parts.

Do you know that you walk around

like a hut with legs?

Girl, Trees, Paper Balloons

1783: How quiet and still the people on the ground

seemed, said the first people to rise

in balloons. Quiet as milk. Somewhere the son

of the son of the son of the man who was the last person to let go

of the line so the first balloon could be free of us

is lighting a cigarette. Heaven is a movie—

even the audience smokes Lucky Strikes.

They have a box there for my memories and in case I burn up

in the light like a faulty meteor I have given them two or three things

to keep such as my mother’s saddle oxfords and the one about

the man described in the newspaper who was dead for three days

in the ocean but woke up, alive, and the one about when the snow in moonlight was whiter than washing machines behind the dump,

and the one playing now, the one

with woodwinds rising as maples seedpod

the tattoos on the slim shoulders of the girl

kissing me like my mouth is a parachute

just about to open.

Last Year’s Checklist

Where are the goggles that protect against magic?

Am I married? Do I have children?

They ask but I do not remember. Yes—

no. Sure. I am practicing how to spit penguins

out of my head like black seeds. Grappa

blurs the Chileans, not later at McMurdo

but before, Rey Jorge, where church is Mexican

blue shipping containers, three pews

and a plugged-in Mary.

Are you my mother

I want to ask the Russian soup

ladle woman with the gold front tooth.

Can you explain it? Oswaldo, laughing,

va va va-vooms his jacket off for her

and pushes his fingers through the cigarette

burns in the chest of his long johns.

He is a mountaineer and paints maps

so he must know why two burned-out Soviet

tanks mirror rust in the puddles of the airfield

but he jumps lenses and escapes just as the patriotic

tuba music of the Motherland fills the dining room

and my heart turns into a bundle

of sparrows and my hands push past

zippers trying to reach in and tuck them

all back into their red folds,

telling them just wait, people are watching,

we will fly around the room later.

I Take Good Notes, Getting Ready to Fly South

An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat. An aerostat is a type of lighter-than-air aircraft. An aircraft is a kind of bowtie worn by the sky to piss off lakes and swamps, dirt, center-pivot-irrigation, forest fires. Aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by heating gas slowly, over a burner, then using a tube to blow it into shapes, a swan, even a unicorn, what girls like before they like the flammability of boys. The history of flight mostly has to do with blood and ice. No, the history of flight in Antarctica can’t be told just now, it is mostly too sad for this time of night, but for example there were once two pilots, I met them in a bar in McMurdo,

and the first one was telling the second one, shit, I had to turn back. The other one said, well what for. First one, well my hair was on fire. Second one said, I hate when that happens.

Scale Model

Maybe just marine-grade plywood with tar balls

and kerosene: if bursts of fire come in matchboxes,

what kind of holder does Antarctica come in?

Draw this abyss,

art school: make me

a mold of France—all of France—then cast it in white resin.

Set it beside a 1-to-1 replica of Greenland.

Only two hundred more pieces of the basement

railroad still to go.

Marble Point Refueling Station

It all comes at us so hard

to remember, beauty. At lunch

I study the fuel tech, how her face burned

clean by the wind matches her hands

outside of her folded work gloves,

hands like a kind of telegram

saying you would die for this.

I will sleep in the freezer

attached to a kind of pipe,

will pee in the funnel welded

onto the barrel, will try not

to explain at breakfast how

by being there she makes me

wince three or four times

a minute. I want to write to

somebody in charge, say, go easy,

we’re new. Later after dinner

I ask about the dog

star, what night here looks

like at night. She won’t

say, but when I ask

what she likes best about

being here, she smiles,

looks away, looks back—

the tilt.

The History of Luck