Des glaçon aux astres

Barbarian
Long after the days and the seasons, and people and countries,
The banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers; (they do not exist).
Recovered from the old fanfares of heroism – which still attack the heart and head – far from the old assassins.
Oh! the banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers; (they do not exist).–
Bliss!
Live embers raining in gusts of frost, – Bliss! – fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds flung out by the earth’s heart eternally carbonized for us.
- O world!-
(Far from the old retreats and the old flames, still heard, still felt.)
Fire and foam. Magic, veerings of chasms and clash of icicles against the stars.
O bliss, O world, O music! And forms, sweat, eyes and long hair floating there. And white tears boiling,– O bliss!– and the feminine voice reaching to the bottom of volcanoes and grottos of the arctic seas.
The banner…

-Arthur Rimbaud

Beauty and terror and childhood who-dunnits in 20 questions. (A man, dead in a pool of water. A wound but no knife…) Sure enough, when you type “icicle” into Google, the first auto-suggestion is “icicle deaths per year.” Despite our collective morbid curiosity, there aren’t really any hard numbers out there. I did find a seven-year-old article in Slate that predicts a particularly difficult time for our Slavic comrades:

Falling icicles, which each winter skewer roughly 100 Russians who happen to be under the wrong building eave at the wrong time, haven’t—yet—been the subject of extensive demographic research.

This sounds like a really bad trend story I would’ve tried to pitch back in one of my early reporting classes…

Lots of the old houses on my street were sporting stunning icicles last week. They’re a nice reminder of winter beauty now that all we have are septic puddles of slush and motor oil and ugly gray lumps of snow.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 12:04 am and is filed under wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.