Have been correcting that troublesome little piece posted yesterday. It may be a keeper, or not.

A replica of Empress Anna of Russia's elaborate "House of Ice", constructed in St. Petersburg around 1740, was built there last winter - article about it in last New Yorker.

Some think the House of Ice was partly responsible for some of Coleridge's images in his dream-poem "Kublai Khan". & that was the poem Teddy Roosevelt kept obsessively reciting as he was near death from fever in the Amazon jungle.

I'm trying to pull together various distant seasonal & weather & political threads into this poem which is focused for the moment around a sort of Lazarus figure emerging at springtime.

Regret the obscurities of this particular section. The line about the "table among enemies" is from Psalm 23. The bit about the promissory seal etc. is from Hamlet.