the frozen embryo children

Mar 27, 2008 - 10:18 AM PST

they learn the code of the undertow
in the frozen sea

mystic, the frozen embryos
a coldness you can never shake
cousin to all frozen things

comes alive in a Fargo basement
in a soviet teenage embrace

embark on the famous icebreaker
on a voyage to the meltdown islands

the famous facebreaker
a voyage to the meltdown islands
on the soviet facebreaker
all the way on a soviet asskicking

assdown on meltbreaker islands
cracking the incunabula of the moon
poor Tina Icebreaker
her voyage was oomed from the start

...
in the general incunabula of the moon. The kids who come from frozen embryos are all part of a mystic league or fraternity. They are cousin to all frozen things. They genuinely feel only most comfortable when they are in ice and snow, or when they are emulating ice and snow with their superiors or underlings. Among themselves, interrelations grind to a halt -- two frozen embryo children cannot productively co-exist. Snow and more snow, nyet -- there must be heat, one of them must be a sun, the kind of sun that peeps over the antarctic horizon and gets eclipsed by a passing moon. The sun that couples with the frozen moon, on a horizon in the frozen sky over Lake Vostok.

When you go to Fargo, when you descend to the basement parties and see the frozen embryo children coupling madly in an embrace at once soviet and glasnost -- there are icebreakers, my friends, with the reinforced bow, the steel hull, many plates of titanium and nickel, searching to break the ice. Tina Icebreaker mounts a voyage to the heart of Vince Vostok. It's a difficult journey, to the bottom of the world, riding then cracking floes several feet thick, floes that have built and have been floating there for hundreds of years. But there's global warming to thank for the general breakup of Vince Vostok's ice exterior. Even though he is a frozen embryo child, he has left the hoarfrost of the test tube, the cold snap of the steel sterilization chamber, behind him.

Though many do not. They remain chilled, sterilized, bonebreak, their cold teeth clicking. They will become governors, captains of industry, power brokers. There is nothing going on behind the cold ice of their eyes except calculation, the slow creep of glaciers, nothing going on but floes cracking and reforming, polynyas forming and disappearing. Only global warming can penetrate these men but global warming is a very slow process.