Icehouse ('94?)

A bank of snow that overreached my head
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.