poetry
February 1st, 2009 | Issue sixty

Gone Through

by Elizabeth Bradfield
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Gone Through

Elizabeth Bradfield
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I have gone through the ice. It was cold.
—David, ice fisherman

Don’t ask stupid questions expecting
some folksy narrative you can glean
poetry from. The water was hard
and it gave way. It broke and widened
as I heaved toward its surface. I’d seen
the TV specials filmed under pack ice—
blue and bubbled. There is no gradual
wetting. There is no entrance.
Only the stupid fumble to get out, heart
trying to pound through its panic,
to warm, it seems, the entire frozen surface
that’s been breached.

contributor
EB
contributor

Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. For the past twenty years, she has worked as a naturalist and guide on ships both at home and in some of the globe’s most remote places.

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