- The London Ice Well
You don’t have to worry, kid. I ain’t going to kill you. You’re the only friend I got.
—Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven
The severed ice of Ugolino’s cold kept its own velocity. Down, down, into the reeking marl of the pit, the guide whispered, brushing your collar
with his hand. We were hard by the rotted docks of Regent’s Canal— I no longer recall the season. The crumbling brick seeped like a wound,
gorged to the throat in rubble cleared barrowload by barrowload in the Blitz. What does a brick want? A brick wants redemption.
A soothing cinematic blackness lay at bottom, halfway to Hull. Ladies of that mid-Victorian day used to cooling “soft” drinks
with ice chopped from fjords, accounted “manufactured” ice not half so refreshing. Outside, boats thin as iron rods
squeezed through brick tunnels. The silence gripped us like a lover. [End Page 150]
William Logan’s Deception Island: Selected Earlier Poems was published in the U.K. this past spring by Salt Publishing. A book of new poems, Madame X, is forthcoming next summer from Penguin, and his edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s poem “Guy Vernon” will be published by the University of Minnesota Press next spring.