What the Glacier Remembers

The glacier does not forget— it folds the centuries into itself, pressing leaf and ash and the bones of small animals into one slow blue sentence.

Ask it about the summer of your grandfather's grief and it will show you a dark ribbon three meters down, a year of smoke preserved the way a jar preserves pears: intact, a little altered, still faintly sweet.

We speak of melting as loss. But the glacier is also speaking— spilling its archive into the delta, letting the sea read what the mountain held in silence.

Somewhere in the silt of an estuary the sediment of a century settles out of the water. A mussel draws a ring around it. Something builds a house from what was remembered.