Lost Diary

“From the Lost Diary,” from The Address Book, published by House of Anansi in 2004. 

2 Jan. 1912: 87º 20 8 S., 160º 40 53 E.



At first the sound was like a raw stropping
of steel on steel although we had little
such heavy stuff along. Or one of the men
once more adoze in the traces whimpering
in waking nightmare but no it was too loud
and instantly repeated and then somebody
halloed There! a catamaran shadow
against the low sun hovering, and now
above us banking sheer and screeching came
a gaunt monstrous skua, first animate
thing we had seen save for one another
and our lost ponies since starting onto
the ice shelf at the sea two months ago.
Half blind, rused by the loomings and the ridged
snow in spars like candlerock, defiling
through gin-cold ventricles of ice and back
into eye-stabbing sunlight—if alone
I’d have feared for my own mind not the gull’s.
Yet we all did see it. And not so little
food as a colony of lichen or a louse
for eight hundred miles. How many days’ flight
would that need? It did look starved. S believed
some disturbance in the upper atmosphere
must have veered the bird far off range and yet
the high cirrus had sat unconvulsed for days.
And here it was not a hundred and fifty
miles from the Pole. Somebody quipped about it
beating us there and the Norwegians too
while the snow-bellied bird touched down ahead
and fluttered always a few yards farther
as we neared and at this, what, this rumour
or fledged missive dispatched by the dream world
of warm yearning life to ourselves a brief
agony of delight punctured the frozen
shell of our shambling fatigue, fear, hunger,
frostburn and returned to us our purpose.
All agreed the visitation was an auspice.
The messenger would see us to the Pole.
Yet I wondered still what she was doing
so remote from her own skies in that time—
not quite an hour—till she flared her wings and rose
with serum-yellow eye unclosing to swerve
close above us in the return direction,
diminishing then dipping out of view
as a bead of mercury in the day’s bitter
foregone——