10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #9: Or, from the Mountain

      Powerful magician, this Or.
Eyes? White stones. The mountain made him.
The mountain, even from here, is the source
of both his power and his heavy melancholy.
      He glows with it — ivory,
white-blonde, bone, moonlight. His eelish skin
is a gauze of stars. As snow and ice blacken
on and about the roads, sightings of him increase,
      coasting amongst cars, shops,
a moving thicket of wild spells. The wind keeps
a claw on his hat brim. The doings of people,
as told by the papers, make a slipknot of his stomach.
      He stands, a silvery hunk
of asteroid, still afire from entering our atmosphere.
His heart is a bowl overflowing with liquid metal.
His lips are set hard enough to mint coins.
      Something escapes them,
quite suddenly, and he's skating atop a beam, already
miles away, a sort of stain on the eye — fainter than
a scarecrow in a blizzard, the ghost of a summer swift.

It’s a short sequence of superhero poems — comic-book-based, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t really made its appearance yet. For this little advent calendar, I should arguably have revived ‘Iceman’ — but I’m not sure that poem has a lot of heart or depth to it, and I’m not quite as invested in Iceman as I am in the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer, of course, appeared in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, portrayed by Juliet Garner, in a mildly controversial (though ultimately inconsequential) bit of casting. A male version, played by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and other monster movies) appeared in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — Jones did a better job of brooding philosophically, aided by Laurence Fishburne’s baritone voiceover, but neither portrayal really connected with the version of the character I’ve found most affecting, which is rooted in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s run of Silver Surfer comics from 1968 to 1970. Here, the Surfer is almost wretchedly noble and introspective, frequently shown in poses of contorted anguish as he faces godly adversaries, existential crises and the self-destructive stupidity of vicious men.

“In every voice … in every human heart … a smouldering hostility!” he laments, squatting on a rooftop while Spiderman tries to pick a fight with him. The messaging is fairly crude — these are comics for children, after all — but it remains refreshing, even today, to read about a superhero who is made vulnerable, even driven to despair, by his sensitivity to man-made horror.

Why is this version of the poem called ‘Or, from the Mountain’? I suppose because I wanted to revise it into something with more of a folk flavour. What if, rather than being coated in silver, the character had an association with orichalcum, the mythical metal referred to in Ancient Greek texts (from ὄρο / óros / mountain and χαλκό / khalkós / copper)? The mountain as a source of power, rather than the space god Galactus, is also a little more grounded.