What the Glacier Remembers

The glacier does not forget— it only releases slowly, one blue century at a time, a stone the size of a house offered back to the valley.

Somewhere inside the ice a spruce cone waits, still holding its seeds, convinced the light is only temporarily gone.

We think of cold as absence. But the glacier is full— pollen from a summer ten thousand years buried, the silence of a continent's breathing, the unhurried record of every winter.

What it lets go has already become the river, the delta, the sea-bottom sediment. Forgetting, too, is a kind of giving: the mountain learning to be smaller.