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.