What The Fridge Said

The fridge I sing. The fridge sings too.
We serenade each other.
The fridge has its voices,
shuddering and humming are two,
clicks and the sound as of rain pattering are others.
The spider knows the micro climate
of the opera house:
its threads vibrate in the updraft.
There are epics and romances of fridges.
Fridges of the Andes, Great of All the World.
There are sagas of the generations of fridges.
The mammoth trapped in the freezer
gets on well with our father.
The great ruminator moves
as slowly through the kitchen
as its ancestors through the mountains,
but not so long.
The same glacial will grinding in the white enamel box.
As a bird it is breathy but evasive:
open the door, it’s gone, there’s only a claw
hanging over the thermostat.
Offer food to the white horse on the hill,
it’ll take your hand if you leave it there too long
and put it in the store along
with the cargo of meals left undigested
in the capacious gut
of the massacred peasant army, but
water is moving at the back of the ice halls.
Headquarters sings and says we must sing.
It’s a song in a cage but a sweet ethereal song.
One pitch and the muffled after-hum of labouring trolls,
a meditational trance which rarely breaks
unless the engine stalls.
Then a quietness clamps down,
so quiet, it is also a kind of singing.