Old Rinkrank's Maid

Once there was a king with an only daughter, and he had a glass mountain built and said that whoever could cross it without falling should have the daughter for his wife. There was a young man who loved the princess. … The king's daughter said she'd go with him and help him if he was going to fall. They started out together, and when they were halfway up, the king's daughter slipped and fell, and the glass mountain opened and shut her up inside. … An old fellow with a long grey beard came up to her and said that if she'd be his maid and do everything he told her, he'd let her live and if she didn't he'd kill her. So she did everything he told her.
—"Old Rinkrank'
They live in an aerial iceberg:
his palace, her prison.
He is ageless;
crouched inside a lesion in time,
not a muscle moves, his ice-heart ticks.
For her, day upon day of blunt refraction:
her youth the frozen wake of a ship trapped in
an Arctic of white seconds… Much too late,
she ups and leaves: jams his beard in a window,
takes the ladder from his pocket and climbs,
rung by rung, out, chipping at sea-green blocks.
His screams are forked lightning around her,
fracturing glass now turning gold.
Warm air flows to meet her, starts to dissolve
her cataract stare — and she is back among
the living: her pristine lover; her father
with his vitreous eyes (Old Rinkrank's eyes) —
her father who built the glass mountain.
There too, at odd angles of light, her once
hopeful self — intact, irretrievable —
weaving ghostlike through walls and smiles.
When she speaks of that diamond distorting
the heavens, her words are split paradoxes,
shards that make her mind bleed; her sight fills with
eerily magnified faces rippling
inside moonstone. As, step by step, she labours
towards the present, her long silences say:
How unwritten the end is…
Now she curves through
salt waves, tracks birds ferrying twigs to
island-mountains shrouded by a mist of
circling gannets. Surf crests into ice-peaks,
splinters then melts, as she walks the gritty shore,
sees skies of unclouded blue, plainly.