The Icehouse in Summer

By Howard Nemerov 1920–1991 Howard Nemerov

see Amos, 3:15

A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt

thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door

the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light,

an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern:

decaying seasons keeping from decay.

A summer guest, the boy had never seen

(a servant told him of it) how the lake

froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams,

with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice,

translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun,

load them on sleds and drag them up the hill

to be manhandled down the narrow path

and set in courses for the summer’s keeping,

the kitchen uses and luxuriousness

of the great houses. And he heard how once

a team and driver drowned in the break of spring:

the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer

frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace.

Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen

among the slowly blunting water walls

where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite

was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned

in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child

who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests

run from a ghostly wall, so long before

the winter house fell with the summer house,

and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.

Howard Nemerov, “The Icehouse in Summer” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Howard Nemerov. Reprinted with the permission of Margaret Nemerov.

Source: The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (The University of Chicago Press, 1977)

Biography

Howard Nemerov was a highly acclaimed poet often cited for the range of his capabilities and subject matter, "from the profound to the poignant to the comic," James Billington remarked in his frequently quoted announcement of Nemerov's appointment to the post of United States poet laureate. A distinguished professor at Washington University in St. Louis from 1969 to 1990, Nemerov wrote poetry and fiction that managed to engage . . .

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