Boulders caught in slow-moving glaciers and carried along with the ice.
Around you, this cold mother tongue
trundles without acknowledging
your single presence, dredges chunks
of landscape, troughs great peaks to junk
and sediment, carries you along.
One of the stubborn elements,
one of the ancient wholes gone wrong,
you’re just a speck. This pale, cold mother
buries you in her enclosure
of locomotion, her slow lunge
of transparent cavalry. You can’t loll
freely inside her, but are rolled
into the stampede of sameness. Dawns
wash blue and violet on her mass
in which frail, muted daylight drowns
through layers of muffling ice. You’re pulled
hundreds of miles, for centuries,
trapped in a blank cocoon that cracks
branch slowly in, and re-fuse later.
Her sound is a chorus of fractures. Glass
shatters to veins, black roots. Whole chambers
echo with splintering. When melting
comes it will be the liquid gasp
of adamant impressions loosed
and streaming from you as you catch
on land, too heavy to budge farther.
Headed toward open sea, as ice
will do when its voice becomes less groan,
more supple, that which must abandon,
at last she leaves you: upright and alone.