Marilynn Breithart		In Antarctica I walked on water, squinting red through the glare at the untouchable beauties that lie just the other side of the numbing sea, mountains beyond reach. I would tread on slippery water- patches of pale blue, shimmering hints of what I was actually walking on: melting ice could crack any time. I walked on land too. Long walks on the short paths where the government told me I could; lingered where they told me I could not. Long hikes over dead hills with no green to shadow the everlasting white of an austral summer. I'd climb those heaps of ancient dander dust and wonder why I stood there, staring down into McMurdo. Mac Town we called that splotch of metal boxes where we worked without a sunset, six months lived without a sunrise. I walked around that town. Taunting blazing sun circled me day after daynight after day after daynight the sun dipping down now and then daring me to look up. I missed night so much. I who was always afraid of the dark but loved the stars walked beyond filthy beaches rimmed with oil-encrusted ice and called to the ubiquitous seals that flopped there loving that sun I grew to hate so much that when a purple storm arose I stood by as it bloated and bruised up the sky until that sun was shut down for a while. I paced on water and ice and seals and boxes and wondered and stopped at the edge of a shore that was not a shore; stopped to weep when the sun stood still and the phantoms of the endless white and gray and black surrendered secrets of lavender, amber and roan, and the sea shaped into ships and mountains and horses that moved across immovable ice that shifted just enough to slip my feet.		Brother Bear Though I track you in the woods do not track me down in the city. Do not ramble about my house hunting ice cream and cake such human garbage will kill you. Your growling proximity to garbage cans and freezers now a cause for your extermination. Someday soon your species will be remembered as teddy bears. Stuffed. Your wildness contained in human cages.