The iceberg moves will-less
through shades of gray and gray,
a tower of clouded glass
seeming proud of isolation, rising
in air. Or the iceberg’s top lies
flat along the water, its misshapen
turrets jutting below the surface
like an upside down, Gothic cathedral
made of ice.
Around the tower and its moat
or the inverted iceberg, or tipped cathedral
dipped in the green-black liquid and remote
in mists (if you could stand in the middle
of it all) is the smell of ice and brine,
rough sea in the purist wind
that blows from far-off coasts
and stays here, freshening.
You would taste a tinge of time
on your tongue, its encrystalled distances
jagged in the strong stark absence of lament—
that chunk of knowledge always inaccessible
but always defended by the physical
world, without judgment or pretense,
simply floating.