Poetry

Coiled under Mont Blanc, the Mer de Glace

          ‘I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel,
whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.’
          — The Creature

The mountain shrugs; detritus falls
into the arduous march of a glacier.
Ice, aspiring to a river's vitality,
lurches and annihilates everything.

Victor suspects the sublime horror
in his son's face — the waiting snake —
as muscles contort to an attempted benevolence.
Under such pressures

the dirt-smeared skin splits;
stress fractures reveal a glistening and wet flesh;
clear, abrasive liquid sluices through the wounds
and carves shining tracks in the brown moraine.

Under such pressures, the apple skin tears:
the sublime reduced to hunger, thirst, fear.

Catriona McLean