These fragments I have shored against my ruin?

Distance

A bearded man, a shrivelled,
Destitute Falstaff, starving, lonely,
(He had been alone for weeks,
Or at least, it seemed like weeks)
Found himself at last, with all his petty vices
At the foot of the long stairway
That lead down, under the forest,
To the ice.

It was as though he had stumbled across an eternity
Of empty space and nothing,
And as if that wasn’t cold and inhuman enough
The void had changed to ice in all directions,
With tunnels spreading through it, so you could visit
Desolation from different angles.

"What made this?" he thought in awe
"How did this come about?"

The corridor ahead was frosty blue.
The walls and floors were lit by a pale ambience,
And all was made of ice, translucent and dead.
The walls were smooth, and made a cold
That radiated out like backwards heat.
The floor was sheer. He had a pair of sturdy boots
-Thank God-
He took them from a man in Pentonville,
Who had no need of them.

"It is cold, and something terrible
Has happened" thought the man.
"Something grand, and horrible, and human."

Because this was not a piece of nature -
The labyrinth in which he walked
Bore the mark of somehow of some intention.
A majestic stillness filled the place.
It had, perhaps, been undisturbed forever.

And then he realised, peering through the ice
Thad had made this strange museum
That there were shadows in it.

"Who could do this?" In his panic
(at first he was afraid, but soon this too was frozen)
"Who could trap a great leviathan like this?
Such mighty life, entombed in the foundations
Of this place!"
A whale arched overhead,
Motionless in space above him.

He cried then.
Where his tears landed, they melted tiny sections
Of the floor, but soon the cold prevailed,
And fixed them to the substance of the place
And so his horror froze, and when he saw
What else was in the ice,
And over weeks began to understand
The measure of this thing, his cold domain,
He barely shivered.

In one room, from which a dozen corridors fanned out,
He saw a couple, lying side by side
Upon their backs, beneath the ice, like figures on a tomb.

There had been a holocaust, of sorts.
But holocaust is wrong -
Not here the fire, the monster tearing through the air,
No raging heat had caught these people.
Here a ship, and there, an aeroplane,
Were fixed into the walls,
And people too, in groups, sometimes,
And sometimes on their own.

"And how, how has this happened?"
asked the man, in moments of lucidity
(For he was growing fast insane,
As he meandered, the only beating heart
Among so many) "What is this mind?"

The ice was one.
There was no seam, nor gradient
To the opaqueness here or there.
It was clear, one dimensionless piece
Of carved blue glass.
How had it happened?

His footsteps echoed, in his waking hours,
Down the web of even tunnels
And when he felt the cold, he pulled his clothes
(Which were now to big for him, and hung about him
Like a limp balloon) a little closer to his body.
He ate little, drank what water he could thaw
From those dead walls,
And after weeks
(Or, what seemed like weeks)
He had still not found the end.

Whether he was lost
(And that cold pair, who presided over the place like king and queen,
He had seen them several times by now)
Because the place was haunted,
Or just devoid of landmarks
(Save that central room)
And the gentle sweeping curve of every corridor
Made keeping North in mind impossible,
Or perhaps when he slept he moved somehow
(He never did see night, not once,
Nor day, whilst he was down there)
He did not know. He never found the enterance.

And so the place became his home,
Although it ate into his bones.
And still, he feared
That he had at last found proof
Of some real, hateful force
That could somehow make this place,
And trap these people underground.

"But how did it happen?" Still he did not know.
And then he came upon a clue-
If the water had frozen gradually,
Perhaps (Oh dreadful thought)
The people knew their fate
Before they froze
And perhaps their faces would bear the mark
Of one last panic.
And if it happened suddenly,
Why then, they would not have known
(Although, they would have been under water
When it happened,
If it did happen)
And so their faces merely show
Whatever emotion they were wearing at the time.

And so he dug. He found a figure,
A woman, standing upright, facing the corridor,
Her hair held in the ice like sculpted fire,

And he began to dig, and as he clawed his fingers at the ice
He thought "The human body is all water,
And if it's frozen, it is ice,
So these people are ice, and of this place
More surely than they are of the earth above
And more than I" And he no longer felt at home.

But still he dug, and soon, he had made a channel,
No wider, at its far end, than a handspan,
Ten feet into the ice, to see this woman's face.
And when he got down on his belly and crawled,
Away from the floor his feet had known,
And when he was near enough to see her face
(For the ice was pearly clear but his eyes were poor)
He found he had forgotten
How to read expressions.

And so he saw her face, and the shape her eyes made,
How they lay in conjunction to her brow,
And the line her mouth made beneath them,
But it meant nothing, and feeling his own face,
For a point of reference,
He found he couldn't make the muscles there
Bear any resemblance to his feelings.
Or perhaps, as he was so uniformly lost,
His face had settled down into a sort of frozen vacant gaze,
Which couldn’t move.

All he had to offer solace was a fact he had recorded in a journal
(Before his ink had frozen, early on)
Where he observed
"That the couple in the ice, in this,
The central room, are near the surface, and they seem
Indifferent to their final resting place. Perhaps a touch downcast,
But nothing shows. In their final moments, they were passive."

And underneath, another line

"Their fingers do not touch."

Perhaps he found the thing he wanted there.
He did not know. He had forgotten what it was
That had lead him on this quest,
And so, tired, he set himself down to rest one final time,
And there I met him, and we spoke a little,
And soon I'll find a more permanent space for him,
And make him part of all the rest, and he shall figure
In this other, frozen place.















Having last line difficulties, in truth.