What the Ice Remembers

The glacier does not mourn what it releases — a blue seam opening like a mouth mid-sentence, water rushing to finish the thought the ice no longer holds.

Every stone it carried for centuries it sets down gently in new country, arranging the valley floor with the patience of someone who has forgotten why they started packing.

I have met people like this — still moving long after the cold that made them has pulled back to higher ground, leaving behind the shape of the weight they carried.

What remains is not the ice but the depression it pressed into softer things, a lake where there was none, full of what fell out of the sky and had nowhere else to go.