Ice Climbing Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Send shivers to my loneliness.
Look at me with starving eyes,
The places where isolation roams
And imprints startling tracks in
The permafrost—
Show me your breath so that
I might find you
Outstretched like Prometheus’
Lover on a glacial step,
Your blooms the frigid
Chrysanthemums upon
Winter’s open sill.
There your soul is an ice sculpture,
Carved and held captive by
The Northern deities insured
No men will come and find you,
Hidden in the declivities,
Beneath the freeze framed falls
Of great longing, in the crystalline azure
Monoliths that rise up beneath
The blue underworld sun.
The defeated heroes of this adventure
Stand there before you
In the jaws of amethyst stalagmites.
Like a child lost in the night
Listening to the wolf’s snuffling
Approach,
In the great and barren upper peninsulas
Through continents of frozen lakes
Where wiser men sleep unabated;
Where I will find you
And save you somehow—