Another Effect of Global Warming
The last of the
ice cap finally splinters like a tray
of ice cubes
cracked into a pail,
and the wooden
workshop floor buckles into the ice cold
water and begins
to sink. Slowly
at first,
bottle-bobbing in the black and white
ice-choked swells,
then slipping deeper
as it fills, until
its buoyant trash
spills out – nutcracker,
skin horse, and baby doll –
bubbled up and
scattered all about, each
in a dead-man’s
float, before the whole picture is swallowed.
As the surface
calms itself, the candy-coloured spires
of the workshop
plunge downward
through the
ever-darkening green, trailing
its inventory of
rewards, its thousand years of legend,
its blackmail paid
in chores and the niceness
of the nice. Yes,
Virginia,
there is a
Greenland shark, with parasites
trailing from its
blighted eyes,
nosing through the
wrecked and lightless halls of Christmas
deep beneath the
vanished ice.
From The Reinvention of the Human Hand (M&S, 2010).
