Antarctica, 1913
Through a skin of snow over nothing
he dropped between thin lips of ice
and hangs in a wedge of space,
yanked from the rest of the endless fall
by his fourteen-foot-long harness, lashed
and buckled at its other end
to the half-sledge stuck in broken crust at the brink.
It’s shockingly peaceful here, hidden under the wind
that’s been the only voice in his ears
since Mertz stopped raving ten days ago—
the wind that can fray rope, unpaint wood,
and scour rust from the chains for the poor old dogs.
Out of the wind on his tether he’s turning
in a diminishing spiral,
like milk at the mouth of a drain.
Ninnis went first, and neatly as a posted letter;
if he even had time to cry out the cry went with him
and six of the dogs and most of the food.
In the crevasse down which he disappeared, they saw
one broken dog on a ledge too deep to reach
and ultraviolet walls of ice. No bottom.
The two men left fed dogs to their dogs,
fed them boots and harness, finally
ate dog themselves. His mouth keeps recalling
the feel of stewed paws, which Mertz refused,
favoring liver. Shortly thereafter, their hair and nails
and skin began falling off. Mertz raged and cried,
bit off one finger, spat it out, finally fell silent.
No one else for a hundred miles. With his knife
Mawson hacked a sledge in half and went on.
His spiral motion has decayed to a weave
without discernible pattern. If he climbs out,
he still has most of one hundred miles
to haul the half-sledge and what’s left of himself
to the base at Commonwealth Bay. Two hours
he takes every morning just breaking his paltry camp
with black-tipped fingers, watching clumps
of his hair blow away, and a mile or two later
it’s night already. He hasn’t got far
since he had to bind the soles of his feet back on.
It’s good not to feel them squish with each step.
He’s lost the cuff of one ear. It’s nice not to listen
to his ragged sledge-hauling wheeze. He admires
the cello-toned indigo around him,
like no other color, as one hand gropes for the knife.
While he’s been dangling, another South African tribal chief
has called for racial equality,
several more Model Ts have veered from the road,
and Balkan Adrianople lies besieged,
but is anyone in the world closer to death than he?
Yes. Some with diphtheria, cholera, typhoid,
some of the women in difficult labor,
four miners blind in a pocket of gas,
old ones at rest on final pillows,
a black farmer turning to face a sharp noise,
an Irish rebel, a Chinese scholar, a woman near Adrianople
crushed beneath a soldier and biting her hands.
Within a few months King George of Greece, Francisco Madero,
and Mahmud Shevket Pasha will fall to assassins.
Next year, Archduke Ferdinand.
Who is nearer death: Mawson, freezing with his knife,
in tentative swaying motion
like the planchette of a speechless Ouija board?
or the cellist of a quartet in Melbourne?
They’re deep into Haydn, the Largo that’s played
for funerals, but today for itself, for joy,
and the cellist sways in the dream of needing no more.
He turns the page to the Minuet, with no inkling
that this night, with just such economy of gesture,
having placed the cello, his other body,
beside his bed, he will drop to the floor
and lie without a pulse in a bar of blue light.
And Mawson will have hauled his few pounds of furs and bones
feet-first from the crevasse, and staggered toward food and company,
marriage, two more expeditions, forty-five more years.
But ever after he carried a wedge of space inside
where a pendulum hung, and he was its little weight,
slightly scribbling on the void beneath;
ever after he waited without hurry
for the time when he would find out what it wrote.