The Giant
A poem
She once had nymphette friends who seemed to want everything which she could not will herself to have: terrible pleasures, sublimation, joy. The foreign slopes, purple trees. The mountains seemed to suggest these things were both possible and forbidden. Impassable paternity at the known world’s edge – she was conceived in a landscape full of fathers. But she was no longer quite convinced by the idea immutable boundaries, when she had rebuilt her own hands and feet each year for the past twenty winters. Snow-daughter, body of blue powder, diffused over the summit. She wondered whether the snow was capable of earthly desire. But what could she possibly desire here, under her father’s sly, aphotic eye – Eye of patience, eye of envy. She had begun to suspect the mountains were jealous of their nymph-daughters. Indomitable giants for whom the want of vastness offered nothing except the suggestive arrangement of snow, laid atop erect peaks. They did not lust for life, they probably had not for a very long time. You are either too small or too large to take hold of your life, she thought to herself. But what of those friends, who ventured out in spite of their smallness, to taste the unfamiliar world – they did not seem to fear that which might kill her. Nature is fraught with the dialectics of sex: sadistic bees and masochistic flowers, the recursive defloration of the weaker species. For how many winters had she believed in these useless, floral narratives? Though the mountains may collude to deny her unity with life, beauty has always permitted this denial. The object of beauty is to remain unchanged by masculine terror – maybe even to love it, as only daughters can. She has, to this point, cooperated in the impression of her father’s insurmountability. But when the mountains inevitably outlast these subject relations, will they lose their sublimity, just as flesh turns to water in the recesses of spring? The father is simply an idea, after all, and daughters are not really made of snow. We cannot say for certain what will occur. She may well go on, enduring her body as cold foe. We do, however, spy two bare feet heading out into the foreign slopes, past the purple trees, in search of something –
Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866, Oil on Canvas, 210.8 cm × 361.3 cm, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn.



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