Weekly Poem: 'scenes from the trip we didn't take to the antarctic'

**By D.A. Powell** your inability to phone says it all: whitecaps frozen in a touchless curl the space in the lungs where breath catches and falters portage across the blank surface of the hills, bleached tendons and the stark crevasse we could not cross: we came to that impasse laden with the starkest gear and most meager provisions the landscape offered its monotonous signboard disproof     gentle soul, I can tell you now, there's no real continent underneath the bluffs thin their beards and the glaciers chuckle to pea gravel static the air, conclamant stars sheen the black sky, fisheye stilled and time comes grinding to rest against the freezing waste of us caught in an icy mortality: we found its echo in eco tourism     you think an _ever_ can change the course of vanishing conjugate the verb any way you wish, you still lack future tense say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter didn't you hear it all along?   or did you think it was just the wind     "D.A. Powell":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81084 is the author of "Chronic" (Graywolf Press), which won the 2010 "Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award":http://www.cgu.edu/pages/6056.asp. The award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to honor work by a mid-career poet. "Chronic" is Powell's fourth collection and was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. It is also a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Powell has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, and served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco.