icebergs slump and rot to mud- and soot-
smeared hills of gritty worn-out snow.
Stranded, tame, their keels and peaks thawed off,
they reminded us of the mounds snowplows leave
in strip-mall parking lots. Glacial tailings
left to molder where the river splits and fizzles out
in snags and willowed islands where fish crows call
uh-uh, uh-uh. Of these gray diminished things
we could claim an easy right, could even climb
their elephantine heights like children playing war.
But we wanted something grand, undirtied—
something to remember as the glaciers disappear.
We wanted, we told ourselves, to come close
enough to breathe a glacier’s pure katabatic winds,
to hear for ourselves the high, explosive crack
of dense metamorphic ice sheering off
the glacier’s face like quarried stone, to feel
from a rubber zodiac boat the plunge and wild
upwelling surge when a calving iceberg fell. We imagined
ourselves rocked and pitched on the calving’s wake,
sea spray’s bright aspersions cast on our shoulders
and woolen caps. That’s the adventure we came for,
the moment we still hoped tomorrow would bring.
Or so we said that night, back aboard our snug
eco-cruise-ship, the hovering arctic sun unsunk.
Tall, bus- and truck-sized bergs of drifting ice
knocked and rang, as if politely, at the hull.
