  What do you think this poem is about?  An Octopus  of ice.
Deceptively reserved and flat, it lies 'in grandeur and in mass'
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes; dots of cyclamen-red and
maroon on its clearly defined made of glass that will bend–a
much needed invention– comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from
fifty to five hundred feet thick, of unimagined delicacy.
'Picking periwinkles from the cracks' or killing prey with the
concentric crushing rigor of the python, it hovers forward
'spider fashion on its arms' misleading like lace; its 'ghostly
pallor changing to the green metallic tinge of an anemone-
starred pool.' The fir-trees, in 'the magnitude of their root
systems,' rise aloof from these maneuvers 'creepy to behold,'
austere specimens of our American royal families, 'each like the
shadow of the one beside it. The rock seems frail compared with
the dark energy of life,' its vermilion and onyx and manganese-
blue interior expensiveness left at the mercy of the weather;
'stained transversely by iron w