Occasional Poetry

Skylar has taken to writing poems during her free time at school, which is an extremely welcome development in our word-mad household. Here's one of her latest:

Ice

Shimmering, sparkling, a blaze of
White and blue cracking in a
Reflecting rainbow, making a maze
On my slippery surface, crackling as
Zig-zags form in a confusing
Way-- I am the ice.

Given all the gerunds she's using, we should probably read her some Leslie Scalapino!

I suppose this qualifies as una fantasia, when you consider how little experience she has had with the subject matter. It reminds me of teaching Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-picking" to my undergraduates, many of whom are baffled by the following lines because they have no concrete experience of the action depicted:

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.

Although the former farmhouse I lived in as a child growing up in rural Pennsylvania no longer boasted any functional troughs, I loved to extract ice from puddles to get the distorted view Frost describes. I know Skylar would too, though it's unlikely that she will have the chance anytime soon.