Poem For A Picture Not Yet Painted

	Icefield in glowing blues and whites,
	The delicate frost-blue that at the touch of a hand
	Flees, and the deep rich dark blue of the water
	Twin and abound in glowing lights,
	Weave through this image of a far perfect land,
	And drown any color but blue-white in slaughter.

	Sharp the headlands, and they dance like knives
	Across the expanse of the shadowed, curvéd bay.
	Distant the mountains, and they rear up like swords:
	Mountains of ice that we have known all our lives,
	That pierce the heart in the middle of the day,
	When we find a dead bird, and can speak no words.

	Sleek and slick the ice, the falling smooth ridges
	So much a part that they do not seem to rouse
	The ice from its smoothness. These are natural hills
	In the ice. The shining slim arches are natural bridges
	Across the dark water from ice-house to house.
	Far above the stars are scattered like ice-making mills.

	Dark the splendor, dark the picture of perfection,
	Because what lives here is not ever precisely alive.
	It is a stark beauty that lives without a single creature,
	Nothing living to stare into the water at its reflection,
	Nothing to race with the cold, to madly fight to survive.
	There is only the life that comes with the single feature

	Of here a light, there a light, locked in ice brilliant-clear,
	Swirls of the frost-blue that will flee if too close an eye
	Is brought to bear upon them. In the rounded blue flagon
	Of an inlet of the bay, and upon the headland sheer,
	Lights gather and puddle thickly, and hidden things there lie.
	Not alive, born of blue light and ice, there lies an ice dragon.