365 Days of Happy - Day 142

Here is another great poem by Anis Mojgani, taken from The Feather Room. I think this piece is lovely and romantic. It makes me want to move to Antarctica.

Fruit

I loved a girl who moved to Antarctica.
She writes me sometimes.
She tells me about the naked beasts that are there
and the orchards that grow under the snow,
how the fruit tastes sweeter after digging it out of ice.
Her hands freeze from the digging
but the fruit tastes sweeter.
She writes,
Did you know
there is a fish here called the Ice Fish? They don't have any red blood
so nothing to carry the oxygen around.
They have clear blood and you can see right through their scales.
At the start of winter, Antarctica's ice expands
40,000 square miles a day -- did you know that?
And that there is a breed of small white snow deer
that bury themselves in the banks at the volcano's base,
and in the morning, crow to the light?
I would like to keep one here with me.
The red igloo she sleeps in
is shared with three others.
They sleep in bunks.
The inside walls are of old polished wood she tells me,
like her grandfather's house in San Francisco.
She keeps a plant in the kitchen
and drinks cups of tea all day long,
writing by the small window.
The penguins here play a game similar to bowling
where a bunch of them stand in a group
and one of them slides down the hill at the others
to see how many he can knock over.
This is very funny to watch.
She likes it there all right.
There are many times though, when she is lonely.
She says there is a part of her
that claws in how heavy alone she at times becomes.
I am lonely sometimes.
It's like an ocean of black oil
and the part of me that is all that I was before
is a white stone
sinking slowly in the ocean.
I don't really know what I am anymore.
What am I doing?
I miss the afternoon.
It is only ever morning or night here.
There are evenings when the beasts howl so much
that the loneliness goes away.
But other nights where the howls only cause her to sink more.
She misses her animals back home.
She writes lists,
lists of anything--
the names of past pets.
The places she wants to see before she dies.
All the streets she has lived on.
She stays up late
smoking cigarettes,
writing letters to nobody.
The ones she sends to me
I keep inside a fireproof box.
I mail gloves and scarves to her,
hold blankets like horses,
and board planes for clear water.