Extremophile

Two miles below the light, bacteria
live without sun, thrive on sulphur
in a cave of radioactive rock,
and, blind in the night of the ocean floor,
molluscs that feed only on wood
wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap
in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents,
at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach
on Antarctic valleys where no rain
ever fell. There is nowhere
life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt,
so cold, so acid, but some chancer
will be there, flourishing on bare stone,
getting by, gleaning a sparse living
from marine snow, scavenging
light from translucent quartz, as if
lack and hardship could do nothing
but quicken it, this urge
to cling on in the cracks
of the world, or as if this world
itself, so various, so not to be spared
as it is, were the impetus
never to leave it.

 

Wedding Night in the Snow Hotel

Maybe she was playing at Kay and Gerda
— there was even a reindeer, wandering

through the fairytale; she stroked its stiff fur
and felt she had become fiction.

Inside the white walls, ice sculptures
drank light and altered it. She breathed

air that somehow seemed to lie
above the cold, distilled.

At the ceremony her words and his,
leaving their mouths, formed small nebulae

in the shapes of "take" and "give",
speech-bubbles bursting. Later, they sipped

cloudberry vodka from ice glasses
that somehow failed to burn their lips.

Maybe it was something about extremes
and contraries, huddled in their sleeping bag,

knowing they would never feel warmer
than on a bed of ice. The shared

lack of comfort, the laughter
next morning as they scrambled into clothes

on the snow floor, made a dash for the stove
in the kitchen hut next door.

Maybe. But when she scrolls through
the slideshow, what pleases her most

is knowing those photographs all show
rooms, corridors, bars, sofas

that aren't there any more, that melted
with summer, that will be rebuilt

with different snow, as a tale
differs for each listener.