Cubic

Now you know what’s riding in the ice—
It’s the tipping point itself, writhing
Around in the tunnels, like mole rats

Inside the tubes you’ve drilled to study
Their cores. But you see, it’s not the cores,
Not anything in the cores—it’s what

Starts to move once the cores are removed,
And all that hard-won real-estate, chunked
From impossible rivers of ice,

Gets threatened by the next wave of greed.
You sense it clearly, haptically,
Tactilely, right at the moment you start

To ease the core out of the hole, blank
Sensation giving way to a worm
Or worm-like turning, felt in your bones,

In your arms, in your chest, as you grasp
The column of what is, after all,
Only ice. A kind of poltergeist

That needs emptiness for survival,
May need real nothing for survival,
It wriggles around your skeleton

Like when an orthopedic surgeon
Removed wrist pins while you were awake—
It was the new emptiness that squirmed,

And it signaled that something of you
Was about to leave as something else
And the old world was not coming back.