What the Glaciers Remember

The glacier holds a century of winters folded into blue strata, each year a pressed flower, a bruise of cold.

We drove to the terminus in August and watched meltwater run from the toe like something confessing.

My grandmother kept a jar of soil from the village she left at nineteen. When I ask what it smelled like, she says: iron, rain, bread.

The ice, too, is a kind of jar. Inside: the ash of a far eruption, a breath that a man in 1843 released before sleep.

We carry what we do not mean to carry. Even now the glacier moves one deliberate inch toward the valley floor.