Jun 2018
OFF THE COAST OF WRANGEL ISLAND
The room was a frozen
block of silence
the out-of-love lovers
like two hairy mammoths
trapped in the ice
of their shared hatred.
Thousand of years had passed
since they had last talked.
Preserved like two rare
artifacts in a museum.
This the "invisible land"
an island of mists and fogs.
They looked like bad
caricatures of who
they used to be
and who
they could never ever
be again.
The room was a frozen
block of silence
the out-of-love lovers
like two hairy mammoths
trapped in the ice
of their shared hatred.
Thousand of years had passed
since they had last talked.
Preserved like two rare
artifacts in a museum.
This the "invisible land"
an island of mists and fogs.
They looked like bad
caricatures of who
they used to be
and who
they could never ever
be again.
***
Wrangel Island is an island in the Arctic Ocean, between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea.It lies astride the 180° meridian. The International Date Line is displaced eastwards at this latitude to avoid the island.Wrangel Island may have been the last place on earth where mammoths survived.
The island is subjected to "cyclonic" episodes characterized by rapid circular winds. It is also an island of mists and fogs and is known as the "invisible land." In literature Jules Verne has his characters trapped on a floating iceberg near here and Cassandra Clare makes it the seat of all the world's wards, the spells that protected the globe from demons and demon invasion.
She was as it happened was reading Jules Verne's novel 'César Cascabel" whilst he as it happened was reading Cassandra Clare's "Mortal Instruments: City of Heavenly Fir", both entirely different books but both featuring Wrangel Island. I delight in such happenstance and synchronicity. I only knew of it because of the mammoth found there with hair and muscle tissue and blood intact. I was fascinated with photos of it and there was one where a scientist was bending down looking at it on a bench and they were nose to trunk as if having a chat about the years in between that separated them. When I originally wrote the poem I was looking at them in the mirror of their big fat room with the thinest of windows when they thought they weren't being observed and it looked as if the mirror had painted their emotional state and that time hung suspended forever in that one moment. They both could dispute angrily or peevishly about their state whether it be in the voice or even in silent thought. I called them THE WRANGLERS after the mirror's painting of them. Or indeed THE WANGLERS because of their persistent arguing or maneuvering the other into the worse position so that the other could take the lowish of moral high ground. It was a bit like observing trench warfare back in WW1.
And so it was through all this happenstance that I placed them off the emotional coast of a stormy isolated island...in some limbo "invisible land."
And as to the right or wrong of my two too human artifacts where right or wrong are not all that easy to place? As Michael Pollan puts it "… morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations."
All I knew is that I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in their peculiar shoes or that particular hell.
Wrangel Island is an island in the Arctic Ocean, between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea.It lies astride the 180° meridian. The International Date Line is displaced eastwards at this latitude to avoid the island.Wrangel Island may have been the last place on earth where mammoths survived.
The island is subjected to "cyclonic" episodes characterized by rapid circular winds. It is also an island of mists and fogs and is known as the "invisible land." In literature Jules Verne has his characters trapped on a floating iceberg near here and Cassandra Clare makes it the seat of all the world's wards, the spells that protected the globe from demons and demon invasion.
She was as it happened was reading Jules Verne's novel 'César Cascabel" whilst he as it happened was reading Cassandra Clare's "Mortal Instruments: City of Heavenly Fir", both entirely different books but both featuring Wrangel Island. I delight in such happenstance and synchronicity. I only knew of it because of the mammoth found there with hair and muscle tissue and blood intact. I was fascinated with photos of it and there was one where a scientist was bending down looking at it on a bench and they were nose to trunk as if having a chat about the years in between that separated them. When I originally wrote the poem I was looking at them in the mirror of their big fat room with the thinest of windows when they thought they weren't being observed and it looked as if the mirror had painted their emotional state and that time hung suspended forever in that one moment. They both could dispute angrily or peevishly about their state whether it be in the voice or even in silent thought. I called them THE WRANGLERS after the mirror's painting of them. Or indeed THE WANGLERS because of their persistent arguing or maneuvering the other into the worse position so that the other could take the lowish of moral high ground. It was a bit like observing trench warfare back in WW1.
And so it was through all this happenstance that I placed them off the emotional coast of a stormy isolated island...in some limbo "invisible land."
And as to the right or wrong of my two too human artifacts where right or wrong are not all that easy to place? As Michael Pollan puts it "… morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations."
All I knew is that I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in their peculiar shoes or that particular hell.
(Guildford)
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