Ice

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplingerâ€s Ice indexes the findings from memoryâ€s slow meltâ€stories and faces weâ€ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost. “I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,â€. Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question. â€. In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernityâ€masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain foreverâ€. ; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchangingâ€. ; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia. With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of whatâ€and whoâ€weâ€ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolfâ€s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a motherâ€s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that Iâ€ve misshapen,â€.  Keplinger writes. So is there “a point to all this singingâ€. Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolfâ€s head canâ€t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,â€.  something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes. â€. And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway. â€.