And in the northmost of the world’s whiteness, pacing
slowly
Far and small in those spaces, white like a shadow
Of white, over that blank plain of silence without
End, those plateaus of solitude, he moves: further
In the secret of whiteness than ever the high-honking
faint
Black ravels of wild geese fly wavering at the end
Of winter; further in silence than the last
Black tracery of unvisited forests that stand bleak
And tall like white-bound navies, hulls sunk in the
virgin
Hush, where the sky is the sheen of a wide shell, and
the creaking
Of their empty rigging gives weight to the stillness;
and further
In solitude than all charactery of shadows
The figured world casts in its turning, the pads of his
white
Feet, wandering, fill their own shadows. Below him,
far
On the grilled globe of the middle earth the furrowed
Fields of men know husbandry and harvest; and there
Are the stern gods on their gray hills, the audacious
Prows of vessels tempting the goddess-natured sea,
And the falling of rain, air’s softnesses, and there is
company there,
Variety and houses, coupling and colours; and
The fires are warm there, the water flows, and the
other
Beasts and their seasons revolve their patient
Caravan; but that is in a different dream. And beyond
the green-altering
Tundra and the stiff sea, indeed before these, he
slouches
Beyond maps, before maps, in a region
With not so much conformation, no: on the dim
Comb of the world, that place
That the maps make white for that they have not found
it,
And white it is, in the yellowish green whiteness
Of its long dusk: the flatness vanishing
Under the bursts and whirls of its misted horizon; even
The years have not yet come to pass, but all
Drifts lost where yet no finding is. Yet all
Conjunction is bloodless, thin as the still air: the
abstract
Meeting of lines projected from elsewhere, degrees
Of the rank world’s longitude, rhumbs of stars; but
though they join
Always under his shifting feet, there is
No narrowness engendered there, but only
The beginnings of distance; and all directions join,
Are lost in his shadow beneath him, and direction
Becomes merely the way he walks, shambling: he the
one
Hill on this level pallor, the single floe
Shuffling miraculous on this pure sea. Space is no
longer
Excellence, nor ice a virtue, for
Both are unthreatened here. Except for him: for the
rattling
Of his ice-fringed broad paws, the secret warmth in his
shaggy legs,
The pointed contours of his fierce head slung
At the end of high shoulders and the long slope of his
neck, like
A village beneath a white foot-hill, even
To the vapours rising and the white-crusted watch
towers
Of his ears. But he is the lonely
Pole in its wandering; and again, his eyes contain
More than the distance: in that whiteness a pained
Somnolence always of wakening. So that where there
was nothing
He breathes the air of origins, and under
The boreal lights’ shaking, and the stars’ remote
Aerie, the new mist is born floating, and beyond
The mist the world may be. Stella Maris,
He points beyond your constancy. Look where
The stars are shadows, for their cold fire is a mask
That cloaks their dim beginnings! Like the love
Of heaven upon blankness musing, he slumps
In slow circles, remote, conceiving, staring
Upon the other side of light, into that cave and cradle
Where, before separation, sound and silence,
Shadow and the first filtering whiteness
Sleep dreamless together and only in his stare
Move toward their wakening: where, oh before
All dawn and division, forever the world begins.
Bear
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