The Icehouse In Summer

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.