The dark green truck on the cement platform is explicit as a paradigm. Its wheels are four black cast-iron starfish. Its body, a massive tray of planking, ends in two close-set dark green uprights crossed with three straight cross-pieces, one looped with a white spiral of hose. The truck holds eleven cakes of ice, each cake a different size and shape. Some look as though a weight had hit them. One, solid glass, has a core of sugar. They lean a transitory Icehenge, in a moor of imitation snow from the hatchet's bright wet-sided steel. Five galvanized pails, mottled, as if of stiffened frosted caracul, three with crescent lids and elbowed spouts, loom in the ice, their half-hoop handles linking that frozen elocution to the running chalk-talk of powder-red box-cars beyond, while our train waits here. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AUTUMN WOODS by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT PROLOGUE, SPOKEN BY MR. GARRICK AT ... THEATRE ROYALE, 1747 by SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784) VICTOR GALBRAITH by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW AMONG THE REDWOODS by EDWARD ROWLAND SILL DIFFERENT MINDS by RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH |