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Fire on Ice

How shall I serve my anger up to you?
Shall I become like one most distant star
Burning intensely, far from where you are,
Incinerating—infinite degrees
Made a mere twinkling to the earthly view—
Till, when its light has reached you from afar,
By then, my wrath, and I, at last have ceased?

Or shall I bid an ice age fill my soul,
Flash-freezing every feeling in its tracks
(As saber-tooth and mammoth, life-like, whole,
Unmoving now, no more to hunt or flee)
To keep, in detail, all the galling facts
For you to find someday, in ages hence,
Defrost out of their rigid, cold suspense,
And savor each offense most perfectly?

Between these two extremes I find I’m torn,
But any middle ground will never do—
As food at lukewarm temperatures is prone
To breeding germs of deadly consequence,
So of my heart I find the same is true:

If ever I should let my icy scorn
Begin to thaw through careless negligence,
I’d find myself a helpless victim, borne
On swells of misery, self-pity, woe,
Or drowned in sorrow, refugeless, alone;

And if I should allow my burning ire
To cool at all, and let the flames subside,
They would give ground to seeds of bitterness
Which, sown among the ashes deep inside,
And anguish-rooted, watered by distress,
Would grow to something worse than raging fire—
Life-choking vine, despondent listlessness.

So now I’m hovering between extremes,
Am alternately either steam or ice,
And vowing I shall never cede to you;
Though doomed to be forever split in two,
No floods of grief will overwhelm my dreams,
No tepid sighs will dull my fierce desire.
Instead of love and peace it will suffice
My heart to feed itself on ice and fire.

Previously published in The Lyric

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Diagnosis

Alas, I’ve been infected by a virus
More common than the all-too-common cold;
What earth’s first poet, on the first papyrus,
Surely recorded in the times of old;

So harsh a virus, few can e’er endure it;
It spreads and worsens with each listless breath.
No known physician’s yet prevailed to cure it—
In fact, the only sure release is death.

Symptoms include incessant dreamy visions
Of charming smiles, of deep and lovely eyes;
Trouble with speech, irrational decisions,
Short fits of rapture, long despondent sighs.

Through wisdom of the ages we inherit
One remedy: more time spent with the source;
The danger’s much decreased if you can share it,
Give in, and simply let it run its course.

.

.

All Right

When the pace of life gets manic
and overwhelming thoughts emerge,
though I manage not to panic,
still, I find I’m on the verge

of a breakdown or eruption
so I stop to breathe and think,
but each ill-timed interruption
keeps me teetering on the brink

of a meltdown or collapse:
clinging… slipping from the ledge…
plummeting—unless, perhaps,
you should see me on the edge

and you just reach out to steady
me and recognize my plight;
then you’ll see I’m saved already—
because you care, I’ll be all right.

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A Pennsylvania native now residing in Colorado, Anna J. Arredondo is an engineer by education, a home educator by choice, and by preference, a poet.  She also has poems published in Light, The Lyric, and Time of Singing.

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The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


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26 Responses

  1. Cynthia Erlandson

    Your ability to carry these fire and ice metaphors through this many lines, and to make clear imagery out of them — at the same time using them to express a personal trauma without sounding maudlin about it — is, I think, a great talent. And, in “Diagnosis”, your comparison of a physical virus to infatuation is very clever. (Not to mention, your delightful virus/papyrus rhyme immediately drew me in!)

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thank you, Cynthia, for your kind observations. And that rhyme (virus/papyrus) was one of my favorites; I’m glad you liked it!

      Reply
  2. Sally Cook

    Anna,

    I so enjoy how you can keep a straight course and still deliver the message — in a bottle, as it were !
    What an ecellent poet you are !

    Reply
  3. Sally Cook

    Anna,

    I so enjoy how you can keep a straight course and still deliver the message — in a bottle, as it were !
    What an ecellent poet you are !

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Sally, thank you so much for your encouraging words! I saw your name pop up in my SCP “poem feed” a few days back. Regrettably I haven’t been able to take the time to read and respond very much at all lately. Hopefully soon — at least after soccer season!…

      Reply
  4. Julian D. Woodruff

    The lukewarm-fire/ice contrast is startling, and your favoring the latter well expressed. I was also struck by the complex rhyme strategy of this poem, with its careful overall symmetry.
    The other 2 poems are a delight.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thank you for your comment, Julian. Around the time I wrote the Fire On Ice, I believe I was in fact alternating between being (somewhat irrationally) incensed and then deciding to simply not care. I didn’t like the space in between one bit, and was struck by the similarity with, of all things, food storage safety. And thus the poem was born.

      Reply
  5. Talbot Hook

    Fire on Ice strikes me as nothing short of magnificent in form and content. Well done.

    Reply
  6. Roy E. Peterson

    All three poems are delightful. “Fire on Ice” I consider to be one of the best I have read related to a particular personal emotion. “Diagnosis” I consider to be an excellently constructed rhyme with a fresh perspective on another personal emotion. “All Right” is the perfect third poem in the trilogy and lets us know that because someone cares everything will be fine.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thank you, Roy, for the encouraging feedback and insightful observations. I have a few more poems in the same vein as “Fire On Ice”, and had considered submitting them together, but I figured that might be like hitting the reader with a sledgehammer. So I diversified the emotions covered, and am pleased to have the poems referred to as a kind of trilogy.

      Reply
      • Julian D. Woodruff

        You’re probably right about the sledgehammer. But please, Anna, bring us the others you mention, in similarly diverse groupings as you deem fit.

  7. Joseph S. Salemi

    Notice that “All Right” is actually a single sentence spread over four quatrains, and the enjambment links everything together seamlessly.

    As for “Diagnosis,” the poetic calling can indeed be seen as a kind of disease. It certainly can unfit us for the demands of normal life.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thank you, Joseph. I was a bit unsure of my execution of enjambment in “All Right,” so I greatly appreciate your comment. “… certainly can unfit us for the demands of normal life” — what an apt description. My family would readily attest to that!

      Reply
  8. Brian Yapko

    Anna, I like “Fire on Ice” for its strong imagery. I’m trying to understand the poem’s structure. The stanzas are 7,8,5,5,7,8 lines respectively and the rhyme scheme in each stanza is somewhat different. Are these variations in form a poetic reflection of the speaker’s emotional volatility and unpredictability? Are the two five-line stanzas which fall in the middle, a reflection of the “middle ground” that the poet references? Seen as a reflection of the speaker’s state of mind, I think these variations are interesting and work quite well.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Brian, thank you for your comment. To be completely honest, I cannot claim that everything you pointed out was intentional, at least not consciously. When I wrote the poem a couple years ago, I believe I set out at full charge with the thought of blank verse; rhymes would come to me, though, and I couldn’t resist. Certainly I think their unpredictability it must reflect the volatility of the state of mind, whether intended or not.

      Since writing it, I tweaked and edited it here and there on different occasions, to eventually land in the current form. I do love symmetry, so I believe that was a strong influence, as well as separating the stanzas somewhat by which part of the metaphor it was describing… The ‘middle ground’ thing just happened to be in the middle of the poem, but it’s nice that you pointed out how that works with the overall message!

      Reply
  9. Margaret Coats

    Anna, I must know 200 fire-and-ice poems, the most celebrated being Edmund Spenser’s “My love is like to ice and I to fire.” You have made a fresh and original work on this traditional motif. I was more impressed the longer I read. Not only do you bring in contemporary comparisons that older poets wouldn’t have thought of, you manage to pull off an intrapersonal stasis that ends with tension rather than resolution. It was worth all the tweaking!

    Reply
  10. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Anna, I love all three of these admirably crafted, inspirational and beautiful poems that tap into an array of emotions with sensitivity, creativity, and a fresh eye. My favorite is ‘Diagnosis’… I love the wink of the closing two lines… great advice. The final stanza of ‘All Right’ brought tears to my eyes – the measure of a perfect poem… in my book, at least. I love this trio of linguistic treats. Thank you!

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Susan, thank you for such high praise! It is an honor to have brought tears to your eyes. 🙂

      Reply
  11. Paul Freeman

    I particularly enjoyed the concise humour of ‘Diagnosis’ and the breathless brevity of ‘All Right’.

    Thanks for the reads, Anna.

    Reply
  12. C.B. Anderson

    These poems all succeed, Anna, because their author has plenty of good ideas and the ability to express these ideas well, by which I mean, poetically. You move through metaphors and images as though they were the very air you breathe. In other words, you are a master/mistress of the craft and the art.

    As far as I know, there are no guiding rules for enjambment. It’s just something that happens when an author decides to steer clear of end-stopped lines. It usually takes care of itself, with no worries.

    But please, Anna, go back to your post on September 1, where I have posted a belated comment.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thank you for the generous praise, C.B., and for your helpful remarks on enjambment.
      Also thank you for taking the time to expound more on your thoughts on my other set of poems. I have taken them to heart and made some corrections and revisions.

      Reply
  13. C.B. Anderson

    All of these poems, Anna, are well wrought, and that is because their author has some great ideas and the skill to express these ideas well. You move through metaphors and images as though they were the very air you breathed, and the result is, well, poetic.

    As for enjambment, as far as I know there are no established rules. It comes about naturally when a poet decides to steer clear of end-stopped lines, and it usually takes care of itself. No worries.

    Reply

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